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THE TRANSIT OF CIVILIZATION 

FROM ENGLAND TO AMERICA IN 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



Lib 



BY 

EDWARD EGGLESTON 

AUTHOR OF THE BEGINNERS OF A NATION 




NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1901 



83740 

Library of Conqrcae 

Two Copies Received 
DEC 4 1900 

Copyright eotry 

flnf. 7)0,1900 
^o.a.M./.'il.. 

SECOND COPY 

Delivered to 

ORDER DIVISION 
nEC 26 1900 



Copyright, igoo. 
By EDWARD EGGLESTON. 



TO FRANCES MY WIFE 



PREFACE. 



In seeking to give a history of the civilization of the 
seventeenth century there was little help in anything 
American, and, to my surprise, I found long ago that 
I could not count on anything English. There were 
many books on Shakespeare, more or less good when 
they were not bad, and there was Masson's ponderous 
Life and Times of John Milton in six octavo volumes. 
These afforded something, but the civilization of the 
century was not told in any of them. It became neces- 
sary to build a description from the ground. The com- 
plex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and pas- 
sion, must be explained. The little world as seen by 
the man of the seventeenth century must be under- 
stood. Its sun, moon, and planets were flames of fire 
without gravity, revolved about the earth by countless 
angels ; its God governed this one little world with 
mock majesty. Its heaven, its horrible hell of mate- 
rial fire blown by the mouth of God, its chained 
demons whose fetters might be loosed, its damnation 
of infants were to be appreciated and expounded. The 
inhumanity of punishments and of sport in that day, 
the mixture made of religion and revenge — these and a 
hundred other things went to make up the traits of 
the century. To explain the things in this other age 
in which I found myself it was necessary to go to 
England. To understand England one must under- 
stand the Continent ; to make this out one must often 
thread his way to antiquity. The use of Latin by 
nearly all scholars made the world's knowledge more 



The Transit of Civilization. 



or less common to all. My little corner widened out 
into a part of all human history. 

Eclipses, parhelia, comets, were danger signals hung 
out in the heavens as warnings. Logic was the only 
implement for the discovery of truth. Observation was 
in its birth throes. Medicines were recognized by sig- 
naturism ; on this slender basis what a towering struc- 
ture was built ! Right and wrong were thought of only 
as the result of direct revelation ; they had not yet found 
standing room in the great theater of natural knowledge. 
Until we understand these things we write the history 
of the seventeenth century in vain. It is the last age 
which sought knowledge of physical things by deduc- 
tion. The next century brought philosophy and phi- 
losophy dawned into science. 

We must apply to the seventeenth century the severe 
canons of history ; people with ancestors will be disap- 
pointed. We can not make out in the seventeenth cen- 
tury the great destiny of Virginia in the eighteenth. 
We must not be sure that the future greatness of later 
New England is wrapped up in the peculiarly narrow 
and forbidding husk of the later seventeenth century. 
Nor can commercial greatness be predicted of New 
York ; nor did Pennsylvania show signs of the great 
industries developed from her coal fields. The causes 
of greatness are not always traceable. Where least 
looked for may develop the next group of statesmen 
and authors, of inventors and great merchants. We 
may write history, but we may not prophesy. 

Joshua's Rock, Lake George, N'ovember, igoo. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

PAGE 

Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists . . i 

chapter the second. 

Digression Concerning Medical Notions at the 
Period of Settlement 48 

chapter the third. 

Mother English, Folk-Speech, Folk-Lore, and 
Literature 96 

chapter the fourth. 
Weights and Measures of Conduct . , .141 

chapter the fifth. 
The Tradition of Education 207 

chapter the sixth. 
Land and Labor in the Early Colonies . . 273 



Contents. 



THE TRANSIT OF CIVILIZATION. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 
MENTAL OUTFIT OF THE EARLY COLONISTS. 



What are loosely spoken of as national char- 
acteristics are probably a result not so much of 
heredity as of controlling traditions. Seminal 
ideas received in childhood, standards of feeling 
and thinking and living handed down from one 
overlapping generation to another, make the man 
English or French or German in the rudimentary 
outfit of his mind. A gradual change in funda- 
mental notions produces the difference between the 
character of a nation at an early epoch and that of 
the same people in a later age. In taking account 
of the mental furniture which the early English 
emigrants carried aboard ship with them, we shall 
gain a knowledge of what may be called the origi- 
nal investment from which has been developed 
Anglo-Saxon culture in America. The mother 
country of the United States was England in the 
first half of the seventeenth century, or, at most, 
England before the Revolution of 1688. From the 
English spoken in the days of the Stuart kings came 



The Transit of Civilization. 



our primitive speech, and the opinions, prejudices, 
and modes of thinking of the English in that day 
lay at the bottom of what intellectual life there was 
in the colonies. Some seventeenth-century char- 
acteristics, long since lost or obscured in England, 
may yet be recognized in the folk-lore and folk- 
speech, the superstitions and beliefs of people in 
America. The number of English who crossed the 
seas before the middle of the century was above 
thirty thousand. Those who survived the first 
rude outset of pioneer life, with their fast-multi- 
plying progeny, numbered probably fifty thousand 
in 1650, and this population was about halved be- 
tween the colonies on the Chesapeake waters and 
those to the northward of the Dutch settlement on 
the New England coast. To these early comers it 
is due that the speech, the usages, the institutions, 
and the binding traditions of the United States are 
English. 

II. 

In reckoning the mental outfit of the first 
comers we should only mislead ourselves by re- 
calling the names of Jonson and Shakespeare and 
the other lights that were shining when the Susan 
Constant and her two little consorts sailed out of 
the Thames to bear a company of English people 
to the James River. Nor will it avail much to 
remember that Milton was a Puritan at the same 
time with Cotton and Hooker and Winthrop. 
The emigrants had no considerable part in the 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



higher intellectual life of the age ; the great artistic 
passions of Shakespeare and Milton touched them 
not at any point. Bacon's contribution to the art 
of finding truth did not belong to them. Men may 
live in the same time without being intellectual 
contemporaries. 

III. 

The science that touched the popular imagina- 
tion in the seventeenth century was astronomy. 
" God gave to man an upright face that he might 
view the stars and learn astronomy," according to 
a couplet of the time. As then accepted astron- 
omy was a jumble of the prevalent Ptolemaic 
theory of the universe with the world at the center, 
and of the odds and ends of mediaeval astrology 
— moon -signs, zodiac -signs, horoscopes, ominous 
eclipses followed by devastating fires, and comets 
presaging disaster and the death of princes, with 
the mystical doctrine of the dominance of planets 
over plants, minerals, and diseases. The Coper- 
nican system, which essayed to displace the " firm- 
set earth "from that central position in the universe 
it had so long occupied, made headway slowly. In 
the interval between the landing of the James- 
town gold hunters and that of the Plymouth Pil- 
grims, the great Kepler, working in obscurity, 
developed the three principles which are the 
foundations of modern astronomy. It was two 
years before the beginning of the Plymouth settle- 
ment that, in poverty and neglect, he wrote: " Fare- 



The Transit of Civilization. 



well, Ptolemy ! I am turning back to Aristarchus 
under the lead of Copernicus " ; and in the loneli- 
ness of his convictions he said in the same year, 
" My book may well wait a hundred years for a 
reader, since God himself for six thousand years 
awaited a discoverer." After Virginia and New 
England were securely settlej^, Galileo was im- 
prisoned for demonstrating the earth's motion re- 
gardless of the time-honored opinion of Joshua the 
son of Nun and the indubitable witness of every- 
body's senses. As the middle of the century ap- 
proached, one finds Copernicanism spoken of as 
" the theory that has so stirred all our modern 
wits." In strictly orthodox circles, in good society, 
and among the people generally, the sun, the moon, 
the planets, and the fixed stars continued to re- 
volve round the earth as aforetime to lighten the 
paths of men or at least to twinkle on them, to lord 
it over plants and animals, to indicate the nature of 
diseases, and to foretell to the expert the fortunes 
of the future. The rhetoric of colonial preachers 
still turned the universe of fiery lights about the 
solid earth. In 1666 and afterward one may read 
between the lines in the non-committal writings of 
some Harvard mathematicians a possible prefer- 
ence for Copernicanism. Throughout the century 
the English-American colonists with a few excep- 
tions rested undisturbed in the notion that the cen- 
ter of universal motion was the earth, and that the 
heavenly bodies were imponderable flames hung 
up for the convenience of man. 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



IV. 

The interest in astronomy was mainly prac- 
tical ; the stars were thought to exert a controlling 
influence on human affairs. Kepler himself lived 
in part by casting horoscopes for princes, as Tycho 
had done before him ; it is by such scullion work 
that the world in every age contrives to degrade 
its superior men and dissipate their energies. 
John Winthrop, the younger, Governor of Con- 
necticut, a fellow of the Royal Society and a man 
of much learning, as learning was then understood, 
possessed some of the works on astrology so much 
esteemed at that time. Among these is a book 
with astrological figures set one on each page with 
the lower half of the page blank. These diagrams 
are for every four minutes of time, and by means 
of them " any reasonable artist " in such things 
" may give judgment of a question." On one page 
some reasonable artist has essayed to find out, by 
casting a horoscope, what was the ailment afflict- 
ing one Alice Wilkins in 1656. Medicines were 
administered when the moon was in the proper 
sign, and the almanacs of the eighteenth century 
told the farmer to cut his brushwood in certain 
signs of the zodiac and in the decrease of the moon, 
that it might not grow again, but to cut firewood 
in the increase. Timber to last must be cut in the 
last quarter of the moon. So Tusser, in his Points 
of Good Husbandry, says, " The moon in the wane 
gather fruit for to last." The Rev. Jared Elliot, 



Chap. I. 



Astrology. 



A Table of 

the Astro- 

log^ical 

Houses 

of the 

Heaven, 

1654. 



Note 4. 



Note s. 



The Transit of Civilization. 



the leading colonial writer on agriculture in the 
middle of the eighteenth century, shows great re- 
spect to the zodiac, and the prosperity of the Penn- 
sylvania German was attributed to his regard for 
the moon's phases. In many regions to-day the 
moon rules the planting of potatoes, the cutting of 
hair, and the killing of pigs ; and women wean 
their infants in the proper sign of the zodiac. 
These are the ragged remnants of the ancient and 
complicated science of astrology which survived 
from the middle ages, and which with much other 
strange baggage of the sort crossed the wide seas 
with the emigrants to America. 



V. 

Most people knew little of the complicated 
mysteries of horoscopes, and they understood less 
of the jargon of astrology. But the unlearned 
kept pace with the learned in looking with reli- 
gious dread upon comets. " Experience Attests and 
reason Asserts that they have served for sad Pro- 
logues to tragical Epilogues." The words are 
those of perhaps the earliest American writer on 
astronomy ; the opinion was that of the world at 
large in his time. On the science of prognostica- 
tion by comets learned men disagreed. " Some," 
says the writer we have just quoted, "put much 
trust or vertue in the tail, terming it the Ignomon." 
Naturally enough a comet " operated most power- 
fully " on the people to whom it was " vertical " 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



— that is to say, over whose heads the body of it 
passed. Some thought that comets were them- 
selves agents of mischief, drying up the moisture 
of Nature and thus producing droughts and pesti- 
lential fevers, and inflaming the anger of princes ; 
as they were supposed to be in combustion they 
excited the air to tempests, and thus raised great 
waves and inundated the earth. The winds driven 
into caves, and by some means imprisoned in the 
earth, made the ground quake in their endeavors 
to get out, said the astrologers. Others believed 
that they were but a sort of celestial weather sig- 
nal hung out to give warning of the imminence of 
calamities ordained by God. Yet others believed 
that, in the phrase of the time, they were " both 
effectual and significant." It was noted in New 
England that when John Cotton, the great ecclesi- 
astical luminary of the first generation, drew near 
his end, a comet appeared which " went out" soon 
after the preacher's death. The blight of 1665, 
that put an end to the hope of prosperity from 
wheat -raising in Massachusetts, was heralded by 
"a great and blazing comet," which, like all por- 
tents and omens, lacked definiteness, for it was 
"accompanied with many sad efTects " beside. 
John Hull, the pine-tree shilling-maker, calls the 
attention of a correspondent to the comet of 1680 
with a pious ejaculation of alarm : " The Lord fit 
us and you for all his will and pleasure." A pro- 
tagonist of Puritanism in its decline was Increase 
Mather. He was a pessimist with a keen relish 



Chap. I. 



Spencer, 
Of Natural 
Prodigies, 
14. 



Compare 

Kepler's 

De Come- 

tis, 104, 

105. 

Compare 

Kepler, as 

above, 107, 

108. 

John 

Edwards, 

Cometo- 

mania, 

p. 3, 1684. 



Josselyn, 
Chron. 
Obs. sub 
a?ino. 
Compare 
the horo- 
scope of an 
eclipse in 
Chauncey's 
Cam- 
bridge, 
Mass. , 
Almanac 
for 1663. 



TJie Transit_ of Civilization. 



Chap. I. 

Am. Antiq. 
Soc. 

Trans., iii, 
247. Com- 
pare 
D'Ewe's 
Autobiog- 
raphy, i, 
123, and 
Royal 
MSS. 
Comm. 
Rept., xii, 
p. vii. 
Acct. book 
of Sir D. 
Fleming. 



Doc. Hist., 
N. Y., iii, 
882. 



Note 8. 



The Begin- 
ning, Prog- 
ress, and 



for the supernatural and sensational. Nothing 
delighted him more than calamities past, present, 
or potential. The brilliant comet of 1680 was a 
call from heaven for a man of his genius ; he re-en- 
forced it by a sermon entitled " Heaven's Alarm 
to the World." When two years later another 
blazing star burst upon a world that had not yet 
had time to recover its equanimity, Mather pro- 
ceeded to expound this also in " The Latter Sign 
Discoursed of," and then followed these with a 
book, for which he borrowed the title " Kometo- 
graphia." In this the accidents by land and sea, 
the disasters of pestilence, famine, war, and assas- 
sination, that had ever come trailing after any 
comet, were once more rehearsed, as they had 
been rehearsed in other times by other sensa- 
tional moralists. The notable comet of 1680, 
which set so many watchdogs baying at the sky, 
alarmed the Dutch dwellers on the upper Hudson, 
as we may see in a letter dispatched by their usual 
post, an Indian runner, to New York. In this they 
mention the " Dreadful comett starr " " with a very 
fyery Tail or Streemer." " Undoubtedly God 
threatens us," is their inference, and they crave 
permission of superior authority in New York to 
cause "the Domine " to proclaim in the church "a 
day of fasting and humiliation." 

On the eve of Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, in 
1676, the people were warned, to no good purpose 
apparently, by signs in the heavens, in the air, and 
out of the earth. To a comet " streaming: like a 



Mental Outfit of the Eai'ly Colonists. 



horse taile westwards" there was added "fflights of 
pigeons in breadth nigh a quarter of the midhemi- 
sphere, and of their length was no visible end." 
This ought to have been enough to frighten even 
the easy-going Virginians of that time out of their 
sins, but comet and pigeons were re-enforced by a 
third omen — strange swarms of flies " rising out of 
spigot holes in the earth " ; no doubt what are now 
known as the seventeen-year locusts. Not only 
comets, but eclipses, parhelia, or " multiplied suns," 
and other unusual phenomena were beheld with 
awe. In auroras the colonists saw swords of flame 
brandished, and fiery horsemen charging in ghostly 
battle. There was always the chance that a par- 
ticularly brilliant display of northern lights might 
prove an awful forerunner, not of war and famine, 
but of the combustion of the earth and the crack of 
doom itself. Rainbows, on the other hand, were 
recorded with a " Laus Deo." The people of Bos- 
ton were comforted by a rainbow after the unlucky 
outcome of an expedition against Port Royal in 
1707, but nothing else came of it. The rainbow 
which raised all hopes at the outset of an expedi- 
tion, in 171 1, also played Boston false. 



VI. 

From Greek and Roman antiquity down at 
least to the middle of the seventeenth century no 
scientific proposition was more universally re- 
ceived than that insects and some birds, fishes, and 



Chap. I. 

Conclusion 
of Bacon's 
Rebellion, 
by T. M., 
Force, i. 
Note 9. 
Compare 
Evelyn's 
Diary, i, 
264, and 
Henry 
King's ser- 
mon at 
Pavl's 
Crosse, 
1621, p. 15. 

Lambert's 
New 
Haven, 
190. 

Compare 
The Rain- 
bow, a ser- 
mon at 
Pavl's 
Crosse, 
161 7, by 
Bourne. 

Sewall's 
Diary, ii, 
1S9, 314, 
318. 



Spontane- 
ous gen- 
eration. 



lO 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



reptiles were generated by putrefaction, or, to turn 
the proposition round, that all putrefaction pro- 
duced life. From the bodies of decaying horses 
came hornets ; but kine in decomposition produced 
hone3'bees. Ovid says that this was known by 
experience, and later writers quoted his verses on 
the subject and saved themselves the necessity 
of observation. The practical bee-keeper of the 
seventeenth century did not read the classics, or 
Gesner or Mouffet, or any of the other innumer- 
able Latin treatises on animal life, but he did look 
into his hive occasionally, and he knew that a bee 
came from a " little worm " in the comb. Bees 
taken from England to Virginia and New England 
prospered. But the traveler Josselyn entertained 
the hope that, when the carnivorous animals should 
have been exterminated, American bees might be 
produced from dead bullocks, after the approved 
scientific formula. Some kinds of wasps had their 
origin in the decay of apples and pears; the most 
superficial observer might find them to his sorrow 
issuing from the fruit. Minnows were produced 
from foam, carp came from putrid slime, the oys- 
ter, the nautilus, and other shellfish from different 
kinds of putrescence mixed sometimes with mud, 
sometimes combined with the sand of the sea 
bottom. So far did Nature carry this economy 
that even the discarded tails of New England tad- 
poles were not suffered to go to waste: out of 
them were formed the water newts, as Josselyn 
takes pains to explain. Lord Bacon, who floun- 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



II 



ders like a stranded leviathan when he seeks to ex- 
plore the coasts of physical science, suggests that 
toads come from the corruption of water mixed 
with mud; to "old snow" he attributes the gen- 
eration of those red larvae or " worms " which are 
yet believed by the unlearned to have " snowed 
down." A chemist of that day, whose work was 
reprinted by the Royal Society, says of fermenting 
bread dough that " unless it were bridled and re- 
strained by . . . Artificial Fire it would proceed 
to vitality and produce worms." It was held in 
Elizabeth's time, and long before and after, that 
parasites Avere bred from the body on which they 
lived. As late as 1676, when Bacon, the Virginia 
rebel, in his last illness found himself obliged to 
cast his discarded garments directly into the fire, 
the presence of the parasites was thought to be one 
of the results of his disease and a divine judgment 
on him for rebellion, though the case is sufficiently 
explained by the fact that he had been dwelling in 
Indian wigwams a few weeks before. The persist- 
ence of vitality was held then as the persistence of 
force is now ; "no one living creature corrupts with- 
out the production of another," was an accepted 
maxim. Lord Bacon states it more cautiously : 
" Briefly, most things putrefied bring forth insects 
of various names." 

VII. 

If there was much lack of book learning in the 
generation of English people that sprung up first 



12 



The Transit of Civilization. 



on American soil, there was some gain in a life in 
which exigent wants compelled a habit of shrewd 
observation. For centuries strange theories had 
prevailed among learned and unlearned regarding 
the origin of those far-wandering waterfowl whose 
distant resting places were yet undiscovered. Fol- 
lowing the analogy of the accepted theory regard- 
ing the production of " insects," including frogs, 
mice, and snakes, there were those who derived 
many birds from wood rotting in the water, or from 
decaying fruits. Others said that some birds grew 
on trees, and proved it by showing the shells of the 
nuts from which the bird had emerged. The so- 
called barnacle goose had been held for centuries 
to develop from the shellfish barnacle which clings 
to the bottom of a ship or a water-soaked timber. 
More than one writer of standing testified to the 
metamorphosis on the evidence of his own senses, 
at least he had found a barnacle all befeathered and 
ready to take flight. Eas3^-going casuists treated 
the barnacle goose as a fish hy virtue of its marine 
origin, and it was served up to monks and other 
self-indulgent fasters on Fridays. Such a myth 
could not be long held in solution by American 
tradition ; barnacle geese were not found, and the 
unlearned pioneer seeking his meat by prowling 
along the reedy shores of rivers, ponds, and estua- 
ries with a great fowling piece six or seven feet 
long in the barrel came to know the life habits of 
waterfowl better than any of that procession of 
philosophers who with pedantic learning copied 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



13 



incredibilities from one Latin book to another down 
the ages. One bit of ornithology of that time 
crossed the seas, and perhaps by virtue of its ab- 
surdity was able to hold its own in America for 
two hundred years. The annual disappearance of 
migratory birds and their return in the spring 
demanded explanation, and in old British folk-lore 
it was held that such birds were accustomed to lie 
hid in caves, rocks, and hollow trees. In Corn- 
wall it was reported that swallows out of season 
had been " found sitting in old deepe Tynne — 
workes and holes in the Sea Cliffes." Olaus Mag- 
nus, a banished Scandinavian bishop living at 
Rome, published in the sixteenth century a work 
learned in form but as full of things unbelievable as 
the writings of the much-venerated Pliny. He told 
on the never-to-be-questioned authority of fisher- 
men that they had drawn up torpid swallows in 
their nets which came to life on warmine. He 
even gave all the details of their taking refuge for 
the winter in the clay at the bottom of the river. 
Once this fond story of the fishermen got itself 
printed in Latin and authenticated by a bishop, it 
became a scientific fact. The new notion almost 
crowded out the old folk-theory of hibernation in 
caves and holes, and held its own for two centu- 
ries, to be reluctantly discarded almost in our time. 
The revelations of the telescope made the moon 
seem near, and Bishop Godwin formed a new 
theory of hibernation in the satellites, which was 
elaborated by Charles Morton, an Oxford scholar. 



14 



The Transit of Civilization. 



whose old age was passed in Massachusetts. He 
preached a sermon from a text in Jeremiah, from 
which he deduced a winter home for all kinds of 
migratory birds among the newly revealed moun- 
tains and valleys of the moon. If that were thought 
too far away for wing travel, Morton was willing 
to split the difference by suggesting that the earth 
might have some smaller satellites — little undis- 
covered gull islands in the heavens for the birds 
to roost upon. After Morton's death, omnivorous 
and marvel-loving Cotton Mather appropriated this 
hypothesis as a piece of flotsam, and wrote a letter 
to the Royal Society in which he suggested that 
the prodigious flights of pigeons in the colonies 
rendered probable the existence of an unseen, near- 
at-hand satellite, from which came these myriads 
of birds, and to which they were wont to retreat 
again. But the English colonists who touched 
elbows with Nature, and had larger opportunities 
for observation than their island ancestors, came 
to accept the annual migration of the disappearing 
birds before the middle of the eighteenth century. 
There were, however, learned pundits in Philadel- 
phia as late as 1800, who followed Olaus in winter 
inof their swallows in the bottoms of the rivers. 



VIII. 

Classification, which is at once the result of 
knowledge and an instrument of investigation, was 
infantile and unstable even among the learned. 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



15 



Fishes, including, of course, sea mammals, had been 
divided into round and long; to these Harrison 
adds shelled fishes and legged fishes. Popular 
classification is always rough, but in that day no- 
body held firmly to the cardinal division of the 
vertebrate animals. The beaver and otter were 
even divided transversely in classification ; their 
hind quarters were counted with the fishes. In 
ecclesiastical regulations it was not always thought 
worth while to make two bites of a beaver ; Lor- 
rainers and Savoyards, as well as Canadian woods- 
men, ate freely of his flesh on fish days, making 
sure that the meat of so aquatic an animal with so 
flat a tail could not be flesh. The interest in ani- 
mal life was unscientific, being mainly an interest 
in the marvelous stories of the basilisk hatched 
from a cock's tgg brooded by a toad, of the uni- 
corn with a horn eight or ten feet long growing 
out of his head, of the salamander that endured the 
fire, of the phoenix that lived five hundred years, of 
the common hare that changed sex in alternate 
years, of men that were metamorphosed into wolves 
in Ireland, of wolves that struck men dumb by see- 
ing them first, of swans that sing before dying, and 
so on and on. Wonders were not wanting among 
American animals ; the unicorn was observed on the 
Hudson, and many half-human creatures, reported 
by early voyagers, dwelt along the seacoast from 
Cape Ann eastward. Sometimes these were seen 
at night dancing in groups about a fire on the 
shore ; one daring Triton swimming in Casco Bay 



i6 



TJie Transit of Civilizatio7i. 



made bold to grasp the side of a canoe and got his 
hand lopped off with a hatchet. Narrating these 
occurrences, Josseljn meditates that " there are 
many stranger things in the world than are to be 
seen between London and Stanes." We are accus- 
tomed to see popular credulity controlled by sci- 
entific skepticism, but in the seventeenth century 
the learned looked for scientific knowledge prima- 
rily in the writings of the ancients, sacred and pro- 
fane, and devoured most of the atrocious stories 
accumulated by Pliny, " the greatest gull of an- 
tiquity." When modern light began to dawn and 
science tried to observe, it was not mainly the 
ordinary and the regular that were noted ; mem- 
bers of the new Royal Society and others thought 
to learn from the monstrosities and marvels ; New 
England ministers acted as soothsayers and ex- 
pounded the hidden meaning of monstrous births, 
and even played showmen to exhibit these ghastly 
messages from the Almighty. 



IX. 

The world invisible as conceived in every age 
is a reflection of the familiar material world ; the 
image is often inverted : it may be exaggerated, 
glorified, distorted, but it is still their own old 
world mirrored in the clouds of heaven. Even the 
love of rank and ostentation in the seventeenth 
century — the snobbery of the age — projected itself 
into heavenly arrangements. In a day when idle 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



17 



serving men stood about the halls of a country 
gentleman merely to lend dignity to the master, 
when one no greater than a high sheriff thought it 
unfit to perform his functions without a squad of 
liveried retainers at his heels, when a bishop in 
Christian humility rode about with sometimes a 
hundred and fifty horsemen clanking after him, 
and when kingly state was multitudinous in pro- 
portion, the majesty of Almighty God required 
myriads of attendants. Milton thinks thus of God : 

His State 
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed 
And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest. 

And the prose of Bishop Hall is almost as lofty 
as Milton's verse, when it contemplates " those 
next-to-infinite numbers of mighty and majes- 
tical spirits, wherewith the great God of heaven 
hath furnished his throne and footstool." Human 
arithmetic had no terms by which to tell the 
number of those who " are numerable only to God 
who made them." The uncountable angels were 
employed in keeping the universe in motion, as 
many eminent writers knew partly by intuition, 
but also by metaphysical demonstration. The 
busy angels turned round the crystalline spheres 
from the outer priinuni mobile, just this side the 
immovable abode of God, to the nethermost of all 
that carried the moon about in her lagging revo- 
lutions. Besides this duty of keeping the lights 
of heaven burning and turning, "these mighty 



Chap. I. 



Sonnet xix. 



The Invisi- 
ble World, 
ed. 1659, 
P- 15- 

As above, 
p. 18. 

The good 
angels. 



Digby's 
Peripatet- 
icall Insti- 
tutions, 
362, 398. 

Hakewill's 
Apologie, 
85, 86. 



The Transit of Civilization. 



angels" produced those "strange concussations of 
the earth" which are so alarming and "direfull 
prodigies in the skie," about which it was not 
deemed safe to speculate. Hall relates that one 
philosopher was stricken dead for venturing to rea- 
son about thunderstorms. It was angelic agency 
that caused a corpse, in that believing age, to 
bleed when touched b}^ the guilty hand of the 
murderer. Angels gave warnings and revelations 
by dreams, by mental impressions and by appari- 
tions; and they even fought for men against the 
spirits of the underworld. Of such stuff as this 
the great Puritan poet wrought the splendid fabric 
of his epic. To contemporar}^ readers Paradise 
Lost had as much of history as of poetry. It was 
an imaginative rendering of the picturesque my- 
thology of the seventeenth century, a mythology 
destined to grow dim in the gray morning light of 
the critical century that followed. 



X. 

The American settlers lived in a different world 
from that which they had left in England, and their 
conceptions of the invisible could not escape modi- 
fication. Far removed from the ostentatious con- 
ventions of the old civilization, the minds of the 
colonists could no longer form vivid pictures of 
heavenly retinues. One finds few allusions to 
angelic agency in their writings; thunderbolts 
which Bishop Hall, "the English Seneca," as he 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



19 



was called, ascribes to good angels, Cotton 
Mather, the New England Seneca, will have to 
be the work of devils ; on this hypothesis he easily 
explains the disproportionate number of churches 
that suffered from lightning. The popular be- 
lief of the time in the active meddling of evil 
spirits was not weakened by a life passed in coast 
settlements, between a wide and wild sea and an 
impenetrable forest filled with beasts and devil- 
worshipers. Diabolical disturbances occurred rath- 
er early in all the colonies, and they were particu- 
larly rife in New England, where the imagina- 
tion was set on edge by theological speculation. 
In 1637 Jane Hawkins, the Boston midwife and 
dispenser of quackery oil of mandrakes, was dili- 
gently examined on suspicion of familiarity with 
the devil. Eight years later a man from Virginia, 
reported to have skill in necromancy, was "blown 
up" in Boston Harbor, and strange to say it was 
accounted a marvel that he could never afterward 
be found. Yet more diabolical was it that men in 
fiery shapes, or "fire in the shape of men," walked 
the water near where the ship had exploded. In 
the settlement on the Connecticut devils were par- 
ticularly active. Hartford, Stratford, Fairfield, 
and New Haven had witch trials, and in some 
instances the ordeal of swimming the witch to see 
whether she could float was resorted to. Spring- 
field was accounted "infamous by reason of the 
witches there," as the traveler Josselyn tells us. 
More than one Long Island town had its shallows 



Chap. I. 



Cotton's 
Way of the 
Churches 
Cleared, 
91. Sav- 
age's 

Winthrop, 
i, 313, 316, 
ii, 10, II. 

Mass. Rec, 
12, March, 
1637- 

Winthrop, 
ii, 1S5. 
Hutch. 
Papers, 
136. 

Increase 
Mather's 
Provi- 
dences, 96- 
99, and 
other au- 
thorities. 

Comp. 
Mass. Rec, 
iii, 295, 
347- 
Hutch. 
Mass., i, 
179. 

Wonder- 
working 
Provi- 
dences, 
iii, 2. 
S. Side 
Signal, 
Nov. 13, 
1880. 



20 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. I. 

Barber's 

N. Y. 
Coll., 462. 

Mass. Rec, 
iii, 123. 
Letters of 
Mission- 
aries, 91. 
Md. Coun- 
cil Proceed- 
ings, 306- 
30S. 
Comp. 
Gatford's 
Public 
Good, 12, 
where is a 
loose state- 
ment of 
same fact. 

Comp., 
e. g., 
Ridgely's 
Annals of 
Annapolis, 
58 ff. and 
others. 



Witch- 
craft. 



Note 17. 



Cranmer's 
Articles of 
Visitation, 
2. Edw. 
VI, Spar- 
row's 
CoU., 31. 



Stirred by witchcraft accusations. Boston brought 
its first witch to trial in 1648, and in 1656 the wife 
of one of the magistrates was " hanged for a witch 
only for having more wit than her neighbors," as 
was said at the time. In 1654 a shipmaster sail- 
ing with emigrants to Maryland encountered two 
months of stormy weather, such weather as only 
"the malevolence of witches" could get up. The 
crew selected a little old woman of suitable appear- 
ance, one Mary Lee, whom they examined " with 
strictest scrutiny, guilty or not guilty." The poor 
old body was hanged " out of hand," and all her 
possessions were huddled into the sea with her, but 
the hungry tempest would not be quieted by the 
hideous sacrifice. There were sporadic witch ex- 
citements sooner or later in nearly every colony ; 
miniature reflections of what was passing at the 
time^n Europe. 

XI. 

The ancient belief in witchcraft, though never 
extinct, passed through a sort of renascence in the 
religious excitements of the sixteenth century. As 
early as 1548 newborn Protestant zeal against 
superstition began to attack all kinds of sorcer}^ 
and there was also opposition to various popular 
superstitions in Catholic countries. The charms by 
which women sought to mitigate the sorrows of 
childbearing were special subjects of ecclesiastical 
inquisition in England in the first year of Eliza- 
beth's reign. The tendency of this was to make a 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



21 



witch of every midwife and wise woman who en- 
couraged her patients by little quackeries. The 
trial of a supposed witch by weighing her wizened 
form in the balances against the huge church Bible 
bound in heavy boards with metal clasps, or by 
tying her thumbs and her toes together crosswise 
to see whether she would float when put into the 
water, attracted a concourse of people and spread 
abroad the horrible superstition. " Swimming 
witches " became a favorite amusement of the 
brutal populace. " Our Countrey people," says an 
English writer in 1718, "are still as fond of it as 
they are of Baiting a Bear or a Bull." The noto- 
riety and outcry served for a sort of devil's adver- 
tisement; the afflicted were everywhere set to 
brooding on the probability that some malicious 
neighbor or some doted old woman of uncanny 
aspect had laid them under a spell. The attempt 
to put down witchery by the infliction of the death 
penalty served to breed new alarms, new accusa- 
tions, and fresh executions. In the time of the 
civil war and the Commonwealth there were infec- 
tious witch panics in England. In Essex and Sus- 
sex alone two hundred persons were prosecuted 
for witchcraft, and half of them were executed. 
Medical skill was dangerous in a time of suspicion. 
Meric Casaubon saw a clever woman doctor driven 
from a town because she had benefited a lunatic 
patient. It was evident to the populace that noth- 
ing less than sorcery could relieve a demoniac. In 
1646 James Howell wrote : " There have been 



Chap. I. 

But com- 
pare Re- 
prouacion 
de las Su- 
persti- 
tiones, by 
P. Liruelo, 
of Sala- 
manca, 
1547, and 
others. 

Art. Visita- 
tion, I 
Eliz., 
Sparrow's 
Coll., 180. 

Note 18. 

Fr. Hutch- 
inson, 
Hist. Es- 
say on 
Witchcr., 
137. 138. 



Casau- 
bon's En- 
thusiasme, 
1656, p. 
100. 



Familiar 

Letters, 

398. 



22 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



more witches Arraign'd and Executed heer lately 
than ever were in this Island since the Creation." 
" All the tribunals of Christian Europe resounded 
with such condemnations," says Voltaire of this 
period. The poor Turks had never a witch or 
demoniac among them, a proof positive that their 
religion was false ; the devil sparing his own. It 
was estimated, on the other hand, that the judges 
of Christian lands had sent more than a hundred 
thousand people to death on the gallows or at the 
stake for the crime of witchcraft. 



XII. 

The classic dignity of Milton's evil angels, when 
marshaled " in battailous aspect," is the work of 
the poet. The sprites of popular fancy in that age 
were groveling and grotesque. They made silly 
contracts with doting crones whom they persuaded 
to write their names with their own blood in a 
book, and that without any valuable consideration ; 
they held burlesque religious exercises and dug up 
dead men's bones to enchant with. They were of 
the sort that masqueraded as dogs and cats, and 
hares and toads. They haunted houses for the 
mere fun of terrifying the inmates ; they took pos- 
session of hysterical people and talked nonsense 
from their lips, and they tangled the manes of 
horses in the night for mere wanton deviltry. The 
antipathies of these demons were equally incom- 
prehensible. They could be frightened away by 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



23 



hanging up lucky stones with natural holes in 
them, or discarded horseshoes, or better still by 
burying " witch-jugs " full of horseshoe nails under 
a threshold, or by the hanging up of fresh bays 
about a house. They were sometimes known to 
the witches who were their familiars by such 
names as Pluck, Vinegar Tom, Catch, Hard- 
name, Jarmara, Elemauzer, Pyewacket, Peckin-the- 
Crown, and Smack. Sprites like these are not 
primarily the offspring of theological speculation ; 
they resemble the gnomes, trolls, and brownies, 
the Hudekins, Robin Goodfellows, and Friar 
Rushs of the tales and ballads. They have floated 
down from ancient heathen times on the stream 
of nursery and fireside folk-lore. But they had 
ceased to be regarded with awed amusement as 
were their progenitors the gnomes and fairies. 
They had come to be denounced from pulpits and 
accused of grewsome and horrible acts suited to 
their new position as Christian devils. 



XIII. 

This grotesque superstition could not be dis- 
entangled from the creed of the time. Jurists like 
the astute Coke and the conscientious Sir Matthew 
Hale, and even such philosophers as Lord Bacon 
and Sir Thomas Browne, were helpless to rid 
themselves of it. It was part of what we may call 
the fixed intellect of the age. The people who 
first saw on the stage Shakespeare's " secret, black, 



Chap. I. 

Notes and 
Queries, 
vol. vi. No. 
151, p. 271. 

Mather's 
Provi- 
dences, 
chap. V. 

Retrospec- 
tive Re- 
view, V, 
122. 

Hutch., 
Hist. Essay 
on Witch- 
craft, 1718, 
p. 103. 

See 

Wright's 
Literature 
and Super- 
stition of 
England, 
vol. ii, es- 
say X ; and 
Comp. 
Douce's 
Shake- 
speare, i, 
382-394. 



Realism of 
devils. 
See A 
Tryal of 
Witches, 
1664, be- 
fore Sir 
Matthew 
Hale, 
especially 
SirT. 
Browne's 



24 



The Transii of Civilisation. 



and midnight hags " were no doubt touched with 
a ghastlier horror than the aesthetic shudder this 
apparition affords in later times, for the diabolical 
dance of witches concocting infernal spells had 
then the force of daring realism. " That there are 
evill spirits," says Bishop Hall, " is no lesse cer- 
taine then that there are men. . . . That evill 
spirits have given certaine proofes of their pres- 
ence with men, both in visible apparitions and in 
the possessions of places and bodies, is no lesse 
manifest then that we have soules." But God had 
" bound up the evill Angels in chaines of dark- 
nesse." This was to restrain them from frighten- 
ing God's " weake creatures " by " those frequent 
and horrible appearances which they would other- 
wise make." It was God's pleasure sometimes to 
"loosen or lengthen" the chains and permit these 
diabolonians " to exhibit themselves under some 
assumed shapes unto men," which gives the emi- 
nent casuist occasion to discuss " what our deport- 
ment should be " when a devil whose chain has 
been temporarily slackened " exhibits " himself to 
us. This very materialistic conception of the devils 
in chains like mastiffs is not peculiar to Hall. It 
was a trait of thought at the time. It occurs more 
than once in Increase Mather, as " the Lord doth 
sometimes lengthen the chain which the infernal 
lions are bound fast in," and so on. In the trials at 
Salem we repeatedly come upon the expression in 
a grossly literal sense. 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



25 



XIV. 

The notion of house-haunting demons — a super- 
stition the niost nearly a survival from the days of 
the elves and brownies — crossed the sea with the 
early emigrants. One such spirit in Newbury in 
New Hampshire, in 1679, threw sticks and stones 
on the roof of the house, lifted up the bedstead 
from the floor, threw the bedstaff out the window, 
threw a cat at the mistress of the house and beat 
the goodman over the head with a broom, made 
the pole on which the kettles were hung to dance 
up and down in the chimney, tossed a potlid into 
the fire, set a chair in the middle of the table when 
dinner was served, seasoned the victuals with ashes, 
filled a pair of shoes with hot ashes, ran away with 
an inkhorn, threw a ladder against a door, and put 
an awl into the bed. It pla3^ed a hundred other 
lively pranks until " it pleased God to shorten the 
chain of this wicked demon." While the chain 
was shortening the disheartened demon was heard 
to cry six times over, " Alas ! me knock no more ! " 
In Hartford, in 1683, there was a gentle devil with 
a taste for flinging corncobs through the windows 
and down the chimney. Stones and sticks were 
sometimes thrown, but softly so as to do no serious 
harm. When the occupant of the haunted house 
returned to its owner a chest of clothes unjustly 
detained, no more corncobs were thrown. In 
Portsmouth it rained stones outdoors and in at 
the house of George Walton, and, what is curi 



Chap. I. 



Haunted 
houses. 



Mather's 
Provi- 
dences, 
loi, no, 
ed. 1856. 



26 



The Transit of Civilization. 



ous, some of these stones were hot. Glass windows 
were shattered, and a stirrup iron traveled off on 
its own motion without horse or rider and was 
never again seen. Sometimes a hollow whistling 
sound was heard. This whistling devil amused 
himself like a true brownie by hanging the hay- 
cocks up in the trees and decorating the kitchen 
" all up and down " with wisps of hay. Sometimes 
the chains were sufficiently lengthened for a New 
England demon to become visible. One appeared 
as a " black-a-moor child," another as a woman clad 
in green safeguard, short blue cloak, and white 
cap. Once the black cat, so dear to tradition, ap- 
peared and was shot at ; again the head of a man 
was seen swimming through the water, followed a 
little way off by the tail of a white cat. These 
American devils with their undiabolical sense of 
humor have at least a family likeness to the mis- 
chievous elves, pucks, brownies, and other " tricksy 
sprites " with which the English imagination peo- 
pled lonesome glens and the dark corners of their 
houses in primitive times. Whether the later 
demons were creatures of excited fancy or of im- 
posture, or both, they were cast in molds supplied 
by ancient tradition. 

XV. 

The phenomena known in later times as hys- 
teria, and as mesmerism and hypnotism, were not 
yet recognized to be due to natural causes. The 
infinitely delicate shadings by which mental sanity 



Mc7ital Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



27 



passes without any line of demarcation into mad- 
ness could not then be imagined, A belief in de- 
moniacal possession was almost unavoidable. That 
men and women might be " obsessed with caco- 
demons," in the pedantic phrase of the time, had 
the sanction of the ages, of religion, and of science 
itself. Only the most hardy intellects ventured to 
question an opinion so well supported. 

In the Massachusetts town of Groton, in 1671, 
occurred a case of well-defined hysteria. The vil- 
lage minister naturally concluded that the violent 
contortions and "ravings " of the patient, Elizabeth 
Knap, " represented a dark resemblance to hellish 
torments." When in one of her fits she cried out, 
"What cheer, old man?" to whom could she be 
speaking if not to the devil? Like many other 
hysterical sufferers, she was susceptible to hypnotic 
suggestion, and in answer to leading questions she 
was able to remember having made the compact 
with Satan always presupposed in such cases. 
This in saner moments she retracted, as she did 
also accusations of witchcraft made against others 
in reply to probing inquiries. She once described 
to the shuddering bystanders a witch visible to her 
at that moment, having a dog's body and a woman's 
head, running through the room and climbing up 
the chimney. Good Parson Willard and others 
present found all this so exciting that they, though 
unable to see the apparition, could detect the im- 
print of a dog's foot in the clay daubing of the 
chimney. 



Chap. I. 

Inc. 

Mather, 
Cases of 
Conscience 
concern- 
ing Witch- 
craft, 31. 



S. A. 
Green's 
Groton in 
Witchcraft 
Times. 



28 



The Transit of Civilization. 



XVI. 

Worst element of all in this delusion was the 
mistaken zeal of the clergy. Ministers of differing 
creeds agreed in believing that the palpable evi- 
dences of spiritual existence afforded by witchcraft 
might serve to vanquish the ever-present skepticism 
regarding the supernatural. Squalid tales gathered 
at witch trials, many of them foul and revolting as 
well as unbelievable, were disseminated as religious 
reading, in hope that they might prove a means of 
grace by revulsion. If any man had the courage 
to question the supernatural character of these dis- 
gusting apparitions, he found himself gazetted in 
the authoritative writings of eminent divines as a 
Sadducee, a patron of witches, and a witch advo- 
cate ; if he took a neutral position for safety, aver- 
ring the existence of witchcraft but denying the 
possibility of proving it in particular cases, he was 
dubbed a "nullibist." This in America as well as 
in England. A new case of witchcraft did not 
excite pity, but something like exultation ; the 
Sadducees were again confounded. The Puritan 
ram's horn of Increase Mather answered across the 
seas to the bugle of Glanvill, chaplain in ordinary 
to Charles II, and late in the century the good 
Richard Baxter himself re-echoed Cotton Mather's 
shout of victory amid the horrors of the judicial 
massacre at Salem. Reports of continental witch 
trials were translated for the edification of English- 
men. By this array of frightful diabolism it was 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



29 



hoped that the swelling tide of gross immorality 
might be checked and religion promoted, for the 
appeal of religion in that day was to fear rather 
than to aspiration ; the peril of trying to kindle 
altar fires with embers from hell was not under- 
stood. 

XVII. 

Salem village, an outlying suburb, two or three 
miles from Salem proper, was almost a frontier 
town in 1692. Men still wore buckskin breeches 
and hats with a brim narrow in front and long 
behind. Wolves, bears, and catamounts were 
trapped. Some of the settlers had participated 
in the desperate battle at the Narragansetts' town 
sixteen years before. The sword and the rapier 
were still worn at the side, the fowling piece six 
and seven feet in length was in use. Men had 
been killed by the Indians in the bounds of Salem 
within three years. Education was generally neg- 
lected ; even men of substance were sometimes 
unable to write. The old patriarchs who had 
made the settlement had just died off; the com- 
munity had lost its steadfast guides. New clergy- 
men had come in and new magistrates, not with 
the education of England, but with the scantier 
training of New England — a training in which the 
felling axe was more important than the Latin 
grammar. The new clergy, men of the second 
and third generations, were, with a few exceptions, 
profoundly impressed with the necessity of believ- 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



ing anything ghostly or horrible ; the supernatural 
was the basis of their piety. Increase Mather, the 
bishop by brevet of New England, had published 
books on the ominous eclipses of 1680 and 1682, 
and another in 1686 on Illustrious Providences, 
which was a storehouse of those dragons' teeth 
that bore such ample fruit in 1692. His abler but 
less judicious son. Cotton, had issued a book on 
" Memorable Providences relating to witchcraft 
and Possessions." It had come to a second edi- 
tion in the very year before the horrors of Salem. 

The village of Salem had the elements needed 
for a witchcraft mania — a quarrel between min- 
ister and people ; a circle of young girls from 
eleven to twenty, including some who worked as 
helps, who met at the minister's house and prac- 
ticed together folk-sorcery and that kind of divin- 
ing that has been the amusement of such for ages. 
These girls soon began to manifest symptoms of 
hysteria and hypnotism ; one or two married 
women also had "fits" in sympathy with them. 
A doctor called to attend them decided that they 
were afflicted by " an evil hand." There was 
some heartless and heedless imposture, no doubt, 
in what followed, but there was also much of self- 
deception. 

The glimpses of the infernal world that we get 
in Salem are highly incredible. The witches say 
prayers to a tall black man with a high-crowned 
hat — always with a high-crowned hat. They ride 
on sticks and poles, sometimes they are on brooms, 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



31 



and sometimes three are on one pole. One relates 
that a pole carrying two broke, but, by holding fast 
to the one in front of her, the witch got safe to 
her destination. The witches fondle yellow birds, 
suckling them between their fingers, and one day 
a girl cries out in meeting that a yellow bird sits 
on the minister's hat as it hangs on a pin on the 
pulpit. The witch usually sits on the great cross- 
beam of the meetinghouse, fondling the yellow 
bird. One man was seen to nurse two black pigs 
at his breasts. Sometimes a hog, sometimes a 
black dog, appears and says, "Serve me." Then 
the dog or pig " looks like a man," and this man 
has a yellow bird. Cats naturally abound, white 
cats and red cats and cats without color. Once a 
man struck with a rapier at a place designated by 
one of the girls, and she declared the cat dead and 
the floor to be all covered with blood. But no one 
else saw it. This is probably hypnotism, hardly 
imposture. A great mass of such inconsequent 
and paltry foolery was believed, not alone by owl- 
blasted children, but by Stoughton and the other 
judges, and by pious Samuel Sewall himself, more's 
the pity! Where is the motive? What prompted 
the most eminent Christians and leading citizens 
to prefer so base a life — companions to cats and 
dogs and devils? Why did this torture of inno- 
cent children, this mischief-working witchcraft with 
endless perdition at the tail of it, give pleasure to 
rational creatures? The court never once thousfht 
to ask. 



Chap. I. 



32 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



The trial scenes were perdition. The "afflicted 
children" screamed, went into spasms, shouted, 
charged the prisoners with torturing them, and 
their apparent torments were frightful. They laid 
to the charge of the accused unheard-of deviltries, 
such as the killing of wives long dead, attempting 
to choke aged grandparents, and what not besides. 
Husbands in some instances turned against wives, 
in others they adhered to them, were accused 
themselves, and died with them. 

The trials were accompanied by great cruel- 
ties. Officers of the law were allowed to plunder 
the estates of the accused of all movable prop- 
erty. The prisoners had to pay their jail expenses, 
and many families were utterly impoverished. 
Prisoners were cast into the dungeon and were 
"fettered." Goodman Hutchinson complained of 
certain prisoners for tormenting his wife ; addi- 
tional fetters were put on them, after which Mrs. 
Hutchinson was "tolerable well." Some were 
tortured to make them confess; lads were laid 
neck and heels until the blood gushed from their 
noses. These were accredited practices at the 
time. Several died in prison. 

The very skill of the accused was against them. 
One very neat woman walked miles over dirty 
roads without showing any mud. " I scorn to be 
drabbled," she said, and she was hanged for her 
cleanliness. George Burroughs, the minister, was 
a strong man, much addicted to gymnastics. He 
carried barrels of cider by inserting his fingers into 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



33 



the bunghole, and held a seven-foot gun at arm's 
length. He was the devil's man, away with him 
to the gallows! The first people in the colony 
became involved. Twenty in all were executed, 
four or five at a time. Their bodies were igno- 
miniously thrust into holes at the place where 
they were executed and were scantly covered. 

There were brave men and women among 
them. Giles Corey, an eccentric old man, had at 
first signed an affidavit of uncertainty about his 
wife, a woman of piety, and, strange to say, an 
entire unbeliever in witchcraft. Two of his sons- 
in-law turned against her, two were for her. But 
when old Giles was accused he stiffened his neck. 
He would save his property, which was consid- 
erable and might be compromised ; he would will 
it all to his two faithful sons-in-law. He would 
prove his steadfastness. He made a will, perfect 
in every part, giving his property to the sons-in- 
law, and then totally refused to plead and was 
slowly pressed to death. The constancy of the 
old man did much to overthrow the partisans 
of witchcraft. Joseph Putnam, a young man of 
twenty-two, declared his detestation of the doc- 
trine. He kept some one of his horses bridled 
and saddled for six months. He armed all his 
family, and it was understood that he must be 
taken, if taken at all, pistol in hand. When the 
mania was at its height he refused to have his 
child baptized in the village, but carried it to 
Salem. 



Chap. I. 



34 



The Transit of Civilization. 



The excitement had risen with every arrest. 
More than fifty badgered souls had confessed that 
they were witches. Some had fied the country. 
But the wide extent of the accusations produced 
a change in the minds of the people. They knew 
not who would be struck at next. The governor, 
at length, refused to call the special court together, 
and after a tedious confinement a hundred and fifty 
were released by proclamation. The population 
of Salem had decreased, its business had suffered, 
and perhaps it never recovered its prosperity. 
Slowly the people got over the delusion and came 
to realize the incalculable and irretrievable harm 
that had been wrought. Judge Sewall, at a general 
fast, handed up to the minister to be read a hum- 
ble confession, and stood while it was read. He 
annually kept a private day of humiliation. Honor 
to his memory ! The twelve jurymen also signed 
an affecting paper asking to be forgiven. Cotton 
Mather, who had been very conspicuous and had 
published a book about it, never acknowledged 
himself wrong in this or any other matter. From 
the time it became unpopular he speaks of the witch- 
craft trials in a far-away manner, as if they were 
wholly the work of some one else. He was never 
forgiven, and probably never ought to have been. 

The revulsion was complete. No witches were 
tried or hanged or "swimmed"in America after 
the Salem trials. In half a lifetime more the ardor 
of the English people visibly abated, and few 
witches were thereafter arrested in Eng-land. 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



35 



Elucidations. 

In 1638 there was published anonymously the voyage of Do- 
mingo Gonzales to the moon, in which clever bit Godwin, Bishop 
of Hereford, anticipated some of the traits of Bergerac's A Voy- 
age to the Moon, of Robinson Crusoe, of Gulliver's Travels, of 
Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wife, and even of Mr. Stockton's 
Negative Gravity, to say nothing of Hans Pfaal, in which Poe imi- 
tated the story with purpose aforethought — and I know not how 
many tales besides. But what interests us most is that under 
cover of a fantastic story, said to have been written about 1603, 
the bishop declares himself on the side of Copernicus and Galileo, 
and suggests the doctrine of gravity propounded by Newton at a 
later period. On time of writing Antony a Wood, Ath. Oxon., 
i, 582, second edition, Hallam, part iii, chapter vii, Wilkins, 
Bishop of Chester, an able mathematician, published anonymously 
in 1640 two treatises, the first to prove that " the moon may be a 
world," the second arguing that the earth is a planet. They are 
reprinted in his mathematical works. See a character of Wil- 
kins in the life of Seth, Bishop of Salisbury, 27. As late as 1660 
Peacham's Compleat Gentleman gives an account of the ancient 
system of Ptolemy, and does not think it worth while to inform 
the polite reader that any other notion of the universe had ever 
been suggested. 

George Sandys, who died in 1643, and who was the poet 
secretary to the Virginia colony, wrote in his old age of the firma- 
ment • 

With such undiscemed swiftness hurl'd 
About the steadfast center of the world, 
Against whose rapid course the restless sun 
And wand'ring- flames in varied motions run. 
Which heat, light, life infuse, time, night and day- 
Distinguish, in our human bodies sway, etc. 

In 1666 Samuel Danforth published, in Cambridge, Mass., a 
book entitled An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or 
Blazing Star. It was reprinted in London. He maintained that 
its orbit was elliptical, and that its center of motion was not the 
earth — a long stride toward Copernicus. He proved that it was 
a celestial luminary by its size, its parallax, its duration, its visi- 
bility in many countries, etc., and concludes that it is a " planetick 
or erratick body." It was observed without instruments. Alex- 



Chap. I. 



Note I, 
page 4. 



Note 2, 
page 4. 



Note 3, 
page 4. 



36 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



ander Nowell, a Harvard graduate of the previous year, published 
an almanac in which he argues in opposition to the old notion 
that planets have no light of their own, and in 1667 he issued a 
little booklet which I have not seen, Josselyn's Voyages to New 
England, 47-52, if indeed Josselyn has not confused the almanac 
with an imaginary booklet. In 1674 a thesis for the master's 
degree at Harvard affirmed the old opinion that the starry heav- 
ens were of fire, but in 1688 it was maintained that the material 
of the celestial and terrestrial bodies were the same, which may 
have been as far in the direction of the new astronomy as it was 
safe to go at that time. Young's Subjects for Master's Degree, 
15. On the notion of the heavenly bodies as free from gravitation, 
compare Hakewill's Apologie, 1630 : " They are not subject to 
the qualities of heat and cold, or drought and moisture, nor yet 
to weight and lightnesse which arise from those qualities," p. 
73. " Light bodies naturally moove vpward and heavy down- 
warde, ,that which is neither light nor heavy is rather disposed to 
a circular motion," etc., p. 86. See a passage on pp. 85 and 
86 on the various hypotheses of celestial motion. In the entire 
discussion this English divine, learned in the lore of the day, 
does not think it worth while to mention Copernicus or Tycho, or 
either of his own great contemporaries, Kepler or Galileo. The 
Copernican theory was a stone rejected of the builders. 

The calculation is based on the " decumbiture or the time 
when sickness envaded or ceased [seized] on Allice Wilkins," 
which was January 11, 1656, at 6 P. M. This is the only Ameri- 
can case of which I know any record. " That ye pty is really 
sick is evident in yt the lord of ye ascendant is not in essential 
dignity, but in his detriment & in ye six house and is in configu- 
ration with bad planets, thein freindly aspects which signifye the 
disease will not bee exceeding greate. And in yt there is a melan- 
cholly signe in the six house, and his lord of a melancholly nature, 
we may judge the rise of the desease to proceed from melan- 
cholly, and all so choler doth much abound and the bloud cor- 
rupted with melancholly humerus the pts affected are these, viz., 
the heart and back." So runs on our astrologer until " the stone 
of the kidneys " is somewhat suddenly hit upon as the disease. 
The book is in the Winthrop collection in the New York Society 
Library. There was formerly care taken to administer medicine 
when the " sign came right " ; laxatives were to be given when the 
moon was in Libra or other favorable constellations, and the 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



37 



approach of Saturn was to be guarded against because that ma- 
lign planet congealed the humors and remedies in the body. 
Aristotelis Secretum Secretorum, folio xxv, 1528, in Latin black 
letter. This work, attributed to Aristotle, was often printed in 
Latin, and was translated into English in the reign of Henry 
VIIL 

Porta in liber, xiv, caput iii, under the title Vt aves tenes- 
cant, explains that meat exposed to the rays of the moon became 
more tender, this tenderness being but a form of putrefaction. 
So wood more rapidly decays, and fruits mature, in the moon- 
shine. 

Archdeacon Hakewill, in his Apologie, traces the regulation 
of farm processes by the changes of the moon to Pliny and Aris- 
totle, and even to Hesiod. Hakewill mentions the moon's sup- 
posed influence on lunatics, the selenite, a stone whose light is said 
to wax and wane with the moon, the tides, etc. " The physitian 
in opening a veine hath ever an eie to the sign then raigning." 
Edition of 1630, pp. 71 and 72. "Mr. Camden observes that 
the towne of Shrewesbery suffered twice most grievous losse of 
life by fire within the compasse of fiftie years vpon two severall 
eclypses of the sunne in Aries," p. 151. Hakewill thinks the 
stars " not signes only," but " causes of immoderate cold or heat, 
drought or nioysture, lightning, thunder, raging windes, inunda- 
tions, earthquakes, and consequently of famine and pestilence " ; 
but he admits that " the prognostication ... is very vncer- 
tane." The popularity of astrology in the seventeenth century is 
manifest from the frequent references to it, and from the great 
number of books published on the subject. The doctrine of cor- 
respondence connected astrology closely with every other science. 
Some of the clergy opposed it. See, for example, Henry King's 
sermon at St. Paul's, 1621, p. 25, and, earlier, Hall's Satires, 
liber ii, satire vii. As early as 1577, indeed, the Bishop of 
Winchester, writing to Sir W. More, says that he would gladly 
know the opinion of astrologers relative to the " tayled star." 
He would " gladly learn what they find in the lower heavens, for 
to the higher they never will ascend." Losely MSS., 491. The 
reader may compare Hakewill's Apologie, 126, 128, edition of 
1630. The troublous time of the great rebellion led many in 
England to see signs in the heavens, and brought about an in- 
crease of interest in astrology. The opinions prevailing more 
and more among the best-informed men of the time are set forth 



Chap. L 



Note 5, 
page S. 



Note 6, 
page 6. 



38 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



briefly and with much moderation in the Spanish work Magia 
Natural, o Ciencia de Filosofia Ocvlta, written by Castrillo, a 
Jesuit, and published 1649. See especially chapter xi of the 
first part, in which Castrillo concludes that " the movements or 
aspects of the heavens are not certain indications of free acts and 
contingent consequences, for these are subject to changes inde- 
pendently of them." Folio 17, reverse. 

These words are attributed to Danforth by Josselyn. Dan- 
forth's book on the comet of 1666 I have not seen. But I find 
the passage in Nowell's Cambridge Almanac of 1666, the date of 
the London edition of Danforth. I have therefore credited them 
to Nowell. 

The discussion of the significance of comets by Kepler in his 
De Cometis, published in 1619, is an interesting example of a 
great mind deriding the vulgar astrological notions on the sub- 
ject, and yet feeling a necessity for some rational explanation of the 
generally believed connection between comets and disasters. His 
explanation seems to the modern mind insufficient enough, and he 
was himself little content with it. " Haec igitur est, si vlla est, 
naturalis connexio horum euentuum cum Cometa." It would have 
been but a short step from this to the rejection of calamitous com- 
ets, heaid' and tail. The works that treat ofthe ominous character 
of cornets were a considerable element in the literature of Europe 
in the seventeenth century. Christiani, in 1633, declares that man 
but a stranger in history who denies that God threatens this " worn- 
out world " by means of dreadful comets, multiplied by suns, and 
other portentous phenomena. The passage is quoted by Voetius 
in his Excertatio de PrognosticusCometarum, 1665. Voetius lays 
stress on the universal consent both of learned and vulgar to the 
bad reputation of comets. Dr. John Spencer, afterward Dean of 
Ely, protested in a learned and liberal little book that comets were 
not ominous. In this Discourse concerning Prodigies, 1663, this 
large-minded divine maintains that God has no use for " any such 
winding and squint-ey'd Oracles '' as those of the heathen. He 
aptly characterizes the traditionary science of that day in a single 
phrase: " A Series of many Assertours which (like persons in the 
dark) shut their eyes and take care onely to hold fast by those 
which went before them." First edition, p. 72. The ridicule in 
Boileau's Arret Burlesque in 1671 shows that the belief in such 
portents was waning. CEuvres de Boileau, edition of 1821, iii, 
120. The notable comet of 1680, which brought the English 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



39 



colonists to the point of talking about reforming their morals, 
brought forth Pierre Bayle's work, into which he built a great 
many other things besides comets. It also awakened discussion 
in Mexico. Sigurenza y Gorgora, a Mexican priest, published in 
1 68 1 his Manifesto filosofico contra los Cometas, in which he 
opposed the popular dread. 

The larva of this insect, known to us as the army worm, was 
regarded with similar wonder in Massachusetts. In the probably 
unique copy of a New England almanac for 1649, preserved in 
the New York Public Library, an appearance of them in 1646 is 
set down in the chronology of marvelous events, as is also a great 
flight of pigeons. The conventional bit of verse at the foot of 
one of the pages is devoted to these omens, ending with the 
couplet : 

But suddenly to flight they all prepare, 

No man knows how unless it was by pray'r. 

There will soon be left no living eyewitness of the flights of 
wild pigeons which were seen in the colonies and continued to 
occur occasionally in the Ohio Valley a little later than the middle 
of the nineteenth centur)-. Let me here record my personal testi- 
mony that no account which I have seen gives an adequate con- 
ception of the incredible size of these vast flocks, which followed 
one another at short intervals sometimes during an entire d^y. 
The apparition seems not to have been so frequent in Virginia as 
elsewhere, and it was the more terrible in 1675 because it had last 
occurred before the great Indian massacre of 1644. 

See the strange notions on the propagation of bees in the 
Insectorum of Movertus, 1634, pp. 12, 13. He says that rustic 
experience confirms the opinion of famous men that bees are bred 
from the putrefaction of bulls, oxen, cows, and calves. Kings and 
lenders among the bees are produced from the brain and spinal 
marrow, common bees from the flesh. My copy of Movertus has 
on the margin a note in the handwriting of the learned Vossius, 
who died in 1649. This is much nearer the truth. Vossius says 
that the " seed " of the " king " bee, laid in single cells, is like a 
poppy seed, and from it the little grubs are produced. Movertus, 
or, as his name is in English, Mouffet, was the first authoritative 
writer on insects in England. His work was translated in 1658 
into English, but I have not had access to an English version. 
Butler's Feminine Monarchic, published in 1634, the same year 
with Movertus, shows how much the practical bee-keeper knew 
4 



The Transit of Civilization. 



that was not suspected by the man of science. Butler holds the 
principal bee to be a female, but does not know that she was the 
only fertile female. He knows the drones to be males, and he 
does not mention the spontaneous generation of bees from bul- 
locks, which had come down from more than two thousand years 
on the authority of Aristotle and other classic writers. John 
Baptist Porta, in his Magia Naturalis, 1644, page 53, quotes from 
Ovid a passage about bodies that in wasting are changed to little 
animals — in parva animalia verti — and this of the birth of flower- 
gathering bees from the waste of slaughtered beeves : 

' ' deputri viscere passim 
Florilegae nascuntur apes." 

This passage suggests the absence of any considerable power of 
scientific observation in centuries preceding the eighteenth. A 
recent French writer says of the seventeenth : " L'esprit d'obser- 
vation et k fortiori d'experimentation, qui nous semble si natural 
i I'homme d'etude, etait a peine ne. . . . Quand quelque fait 
contredisait trop ouvertement la theorie, ils s'en tiraient par une 
subtilit^." Folet, Moliere, et la Medecine, 61. 

The Gentleman Instructed, 1713, p. 316: "He shews us 
what our idoliz'd Bodies are by the Infection of Lice, Worms, 
and Toads they produce." Movertus, Insectorum Theatrum, 
1634, explains the rise of differing parasites on various parts of 
the human body, p. 260 : " Ex humoribus came adipe, sudori- 
busque corruptis ortum habent omnes pediculi ; et pro loci humo- 
risque natura longe differunt." The generation of such parasites 
he regards as an unmistakable sign of misery and sometimes an 
inevitable scourge of God. This was the notion that Nathaniel 
Bacon's opponents made the most of in Virginia. On vital prod- 
ucts of the putrid humors of the human body, see Levinus Lem- 
nius De Miracvlis Occvltis Natvrs, liber iv, page 403 (1604). 
Lemnius says that snakes are produced from the decay of the 
spinal marrow. 

Art can beget bees, hornets, beetles, wasps, 

Out of the carcases ... of creatures ; 

Yea, scorpions of an herb, being rightly placed. 

Ben Jonson's Alchemist, act ii, scene i. 

Lord Bacon's Natural History, section 696, discusses the 
generation of insects. Moths originate, he says, in woolen fabrics, 
especially those in a moist condition. Bacon had got as far as 
to suppose that creatures spontaneously generated sometimes 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



41 



reproduce their kind by procreation. Compare section 900. 
Dade's Almanac for 1684 says that an unusual number of frogs, 
flies, locusts, and so on, is a sign of a pestilential season. " For 
these creatures, being ingendered of Putrefaction, shew a general 
disposition of the Year and constitution of the Aire to Putrefac- 
tion." In one of the early volumes of the Royal Society's Trans- 
actions is a proposition to produce cochineal dye in England by 
generation of insects from putrefaction. Sir Kenelm Digby, then 
much esteemed, says that the earth at the outset was most " apt- 
ly tempered and dispos'd " and "brought forth perfect animals ; 
as it now being barrener, of its own accord, produces such as we 
call insecta, as Mice and Frogs, and sometimes new fashion'd 
Animals." Peripatetical Institutions, appendix 356, 357. The 
underlying thought in science and theology was that the world 
was " worn out " or in decay, and the general effect was a paralyz- 
ing pessimism. It was not worth while to do anything notable 
so near the world's end, as there would be " scarcely any posterity 
to inherit its memory." See Milton's University oration in Mas- 
son, i, 230, and Hakewill's Apologie, generally with others on 
"great sickness and malice of the times." On spontaneous 
generation compare Browne's Vulgar Errors, 78, 107, 109, 193, 
and especially on p. 148 his allusion to "the receipt to make 
Mice out of Wheat . . . which Helmont hath delivered." In- 
crease Mather in his Illustrious Providences says that demons 
can make insects, no seminal virtue being required. Compare 
also Early English Text Society, v, 229, on the generation of eels. 
But a new spirit of wholesome scientific skepticism was born in 
the seventeenth century. The first to question the " equivocal 
generation " of insects, so far as I know, was Aramatori, in a letter 
written in 1625. Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, xiv, 433. 
Meantime Dr. William Harvey, one of the first scientific minds of 
the world, took up the subject of generation and published his 
researches in 165 1. In these his genius struck out the great truth 
that every animal is from the ^gg. In regard to insects and their 
spontaneous generation he speaks ambiguously, but the portion 
of his work devoted to the generation of insects was destroyed or 
lost in the civil war, and we can never know just how far he had 
advanced. See Dr. Ent's letter in Willis's translation of Harvey's 
works, Sydenham Society, 148, and the passages in Harvey on 
Generation, 170, 456. Werner Rolfink, of Jena, the most learned 
of German anatomists, and a follower of Harvey, published a text- 
book on chemistry in 1661 in which he rejected palingenesis. 



Chap. I. 



42 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Sprengel's Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iv, 364. About this time 
the infant Royal Society of London was listening to papers on 
" the equivocal generation of insects," on " the making of insects 
with cheese and sack," and on " the generation of insects out of 
dead cantharides "; but there was one paper whose title implies 
true experimentation " of Flesh not breeding Worms when se- 
cured from fly-blowings.'' Sprat's Royal Society, 198, 223. The 
times were ripening for a great discoverer who should, in spite of 
Aristotle, extinguish the ancient error and clear the way for 
modern biology. In 1686 Redi, a Franciscan monk, and also an 
enthusiastic advocate of Harvey's doctrines, published his experi- 
ments, showing that " none were generated by putrefaction as the 
ancients believed." Even so great a naturalist as John Ray was 
rather slow to receive so surprising a conclusion. Transactions of 
the Royal Society, Abridgment ii, 765. But though Redi con- 
ceded in the spirit of the old philosophy that the " vegetable soul 
of the plant" might produce the anomalous little creatures found in 
excrescences, his general conclusion is a broad one : " Venga tutta 
dalla Semenza reale, e vera della piante degli animali stessi, i quali 
col mezzo dal proprio seme loro Spezia conservano." Opere, iii, 1 5. 

Salmon's English Physician, or the Druggist's Shop Opened, 
1693 : " For a long time it was a received Opinion, that they [the 
barnacle geese] were bred out of old rotten Wood ... by the en- 
forming power of water : afterwards that they were bred out of 
certain Shells, which bred upon or stuck to these pieces of Timber, 
which by means of Sea-weed are fastened thereto by the holes of 
the rotten W^ood, as Michael Mejer writes." Salmon gives here a 
long list of authorities, and proceeds : " Gerarde in his History of 
Plants, 1588, tells us what he had seen with his Eyes and touched 
with his hands . . . Shells in shape like those of a Muscle . . . 
out of which in time comes the shape and form of a Bird, which 
when it is perfectly formed the shell opens, and the Bird comes 
forth, hanging by the Bill ; in short space after it comes to matu- 
rity and falls into the Sea where it gets Feathers." But the no- 
tion had been contested, and Salmon gives some statements in 
opposition, citing strong words from the closing part of Fabius 
Columna's Phytobasanos, pp. 507-511. For another convinced 
eyewitness see Harrison in Holinshed, i, 67, 374, edition of 
1807. Compare Bury wills, Camden Society, 243. and Sir R. 
Murray in Abridgment of Philosophical Transactions, iii, 853, 
and Dr. T. Robinson, the same, number 172, p. 1036. For a 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



43 



modern treatment of the question, Muller's Science of Language, 
ii, lecture xiii. Lovell's History of Animals, 1661, cites Gesner 
on this subject, and Douce's Shakespeare, i, 24, refers to Caspar 
Schot's Physica Curiosa. The evolution of the barnacle into a 
goose was not the only absurdity of the sort credited. LovelFs 
History of Animals and Minerals, 1661, says under "bistard," or 
bustard : " Some report that they generate by the month by eruc- 
tation of sperme." On the barnacle compare Dr. Andrew D. 
White's Warfare of Science and Theology, 36, where the Stras- 
burg edition of Mandeville of 1484 is mentioned as having pic- 
tured illustrations both of birds and of beasts produced in the 
fruit of trees. Bishop Hall proposes for the arms of an upstart 
boaster of an ancestry traceable to the Conqueror — 

The Scottish barnacle (if I might choose) 
That of a worme doth waxe a winged goose. 

— Liber iv, Satire ii. 

In Porta's Magia Naturalis, liber ii, caput iii, is an account of 
birds produced from the putrefying fruits of trees, and a section 
entitled Aves 6 lignorum putrefactione. In this is given, after 
Cesner, all the details of the spontaneous production of worms in 
wood that presently have a head, feet, wings, and tail feathers, 
and grow to the bigness of geese and fly away. Carden sage in 
decay will also produce birds. One finds in the Manuscript Com- 
mission, Eleventh Report, part iii, 27, that Colonel Solomon 
Richard had observed the barnacle geese to arrive in Ireland on 
the 2 1 St of August for twenty years with their young, and sup- 
posed them to have bred in the isles of Scotland. Richard lived 
in the later seventeenth century. 

The first appearance in English dress of what we may call 
the Scandinavian myth of the swallow is, I believe, in Richard 
Carew's Survey of Cornwall, 1602, folio 25, reverse. " Olaus 
Magnus," says Carew, " maketh a farre stranger report. For he 
saith that in the North parts of the world as Summer weareth 
out they clap mouth to mouth, wing to wing, legge in legge, and 
so after a sweete singing fall down into certaine great lakes or 
pooles amongst the canes from whence the next spring they re- 
ceive a new resurrection. The fishermen in winter doe some- 
times light on these swallows congealed in clods of a Slymie sub- 
stance," etc. Carew also mentions confirmatory accounts re- 
ceived from a Venetian ambassador employed in Poland, and 
from travelers. In an epitome of Olaus, published in 1562, the 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



swallows are seen in the fishermen's net. Burton's Anatomy of 
Melancholy, ii, 2, 3, cites both Olaus and Carew, but Burton is 
staggered by the statement of Peter Martyr that swallows and 
Spanish kites were flying in Egypt in December and January. 
An early paper before the Royal Society is entitled " Relation 
of swallows living after they have been frozen under the water." 
Sprat, 199. Samuel Johnson, whose chief merit was that he could 
translate a thing into Latin-English, says " the swallows conglo- 
bulate themselves," and so fall down. White, of Selbourne, strug- 
gled with the question of the hibernation of swallows ; unable to 
verify the Scandinavian notion of torpor in the mud at the bottom 
of rivers and pools, he finally accepts in part the older English be- 
lief. He says that " many of the swallow kind do not depart from 
this island, but lay themselves up in holes and caverns, and do, in- 
sect-like and bat-like, come forth at mild times, and then retire again 
into their latebrae or lurking places." The letter from which this 
was taken was written in 1772. I am indebted to Mrs. Ripley 
Hitchcock for calling my attention to White's discussion of the 
question, and for this list of references to Mr. Burrough's edition : 
i. 35- 49- 8I' 9I' '49. 156, 175; ii, i, 41,83, 140, 147, 158, 164. 
Kalm found the Scandinavian theory prevalent among the de- 
scendants of the old Swedish colony on the Delaware. The 
Dutch at Albany held the other theory of repose in holes in the 
rocks, while the Canadians and English settlers had somehow 
come to believe in migration. Kalm's Travels, ii, 146. But 
the theory of torpidity was held by the Philadelphia naturalist 
Barton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ord's Life 
of Wilson, 191. According to William Bartram, " very celebrated 
men" were able to believe in it in 1792, and I have somewhere 
seen a paper, published in Philadelphia as late as 1800, combating 
the very tough delusion that swallows hibernated in the water. 
In the American Philosophical Transactions, vi, p. 59 (1801), is a 
story thirty years old told by Colonel Antes of a swallow taken 
out of the slime in February. Salmon, whose English Physician, 
or the Druggist's Shop Opened, is dated 1693, does not mention 
either of the theories of hibernation so much discussed earlier and 
later. He treats the swallow, the throstle, and the fieldfare as 
migratory, on the authority of Aldrovandus and Peter Martyr. 
Dante held to migration : " Come le augei che vernan lungo il 
Nilo." Purgatory, xxiv, line 63. It probably holds good of the 
Latin races that they knew the facts from their residence on the 
Mediterranean. 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



45 



Charles Morton was perhaps the most accomplished scholar 
that came to New England in the colonial period. He arrived in 
1686, and was appointed vice-president of Harvard College, with 
the expectation of being made president. He read lectures on 
philosophy at his home in Charlestown which attracted so many 
from the college that he found it wise to desist. He died in 1698. 
See an account of him, 2 Massachusetts Historical Collection, i, 
158-162, and Quincy's History of Harvard College, \,passi7n. 

Richard, in his Dissertation sur la Possession des corps . . . 
paries demons, Amiens, 1746, attributes to the Anabaptists the 
opinion that the word angel is only the name of an office, and 
that scriptural angels are subjective apparitions, or rather " les 
bonne ou les mauvaises pensees." Dufresnoy's Recueil de 
Dissertations sur les Apparitions, tome ii, part i, page 196. No 
such opinion, I think, existed among the New England Puritans ; 
but good angels were not so conspicuous in the theology of the 
colonies generally as were bad demons. Cotton Mather had 
great hopes of what good angels might do for him, but that was 
wholly personal, and born of an imagination that could not be 
contained within limits. Wendell's Life of Mather. 

See the remarks of Sprengel on the increase of demonism af- 
ter the Reformation, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iii, 273, 274. 
Luther inherited the traditions of the humble class from which he 
sprang, and set the first Protestant example of extreme faith in 
witchcraft, berating the medical men who traced diseases to 
natural causes, most of which he himself attributed to the devil. 
He advised that an afflicted child should be cast into the river 
Mulde, and complained afterward that he was not obeyed. After 
the Reformation melancholy and hysterical women could no longer 
relieve their morbid sense of culpability by a meritorious pilgrim- 
age. Perhaps this sort of faith cure was the greatest benefit 
of the old religion lost by the Lutheran revolution. Puritanism 
sometimes drove such brain-sick creatures to stark madness. 

The entirely unlawful ordeal by water was retained in Protes- 
tant England after that which gave it virtue, the prayers of the 
priest in tying the thumbs and toes together and his solemn ad- 
juration to th.e water, was suppressed. The wise King James, in 
his Demonology, felt bound to find another reason for the witch's 
floating. According to that Solomon, the water rejected her for 
having renounced baptism in her bargain with the devil, A full 
account of the ancient ordeal by water as practiced on the Con- 



Chap. I. 

Note 15, 
page 13. 



Note 16, 
page 18. 



Note 17, 
page 20. 



Note 18, 
page 21. 



46 



The Transit of Civilization. 



tinent is g-iven by a Dutch writer, Scheltema, in his Geschiedenis" 
der Heksenprocessen, pp. 69 and 70, and the note in the appen- 
dix, 1 8 and 19, where also the mode of exorcising devils is described. 
The English witch-finders in the seventeenth century not only 
lacked the prayers and adjurations of the priests, but the rack hav- 
ing been disused, they were compelled to substitute the torture of 
enforced vigils and incessant walking to wring confessions from 
their victims. Both Scheltema and Hutchinson express their 
belief that the mode of holding the rope had much to do with the 
witch's floating. See an account of " swimming " a man and a 
woman at Hartford, Conn., in Mather's Illustrious Providences. 
Mather strongly disapproves of the custom, which was obsolete 
in the south of Europe in his time. It was also opposed by all 
the German academies. Mather cites Sprenger that it had for- 
merly been used for those accused of other crimes. " The devil 
is in it," he says. The declaration of Chief-Justice Parker, in 
1712, that if any supposed witch should thereafter die in the dan- 
gerous ordeal, those who put her into the water would be held 
guilty of willful murder, is commonly said to have put an end to 
the rare sport of baiting old women in England ; but, according 
to Hutchinson, it appears to have been still in vogue some years 
later. A man was " swam for a wizard " in Suffolk, England, as 
late as 1825. Hone's Everj^ Day Book, i, 942, quoting London 
Times of July 19, 1825. It is to the credit of Increase Mather 
that he insists that witch confessions should be voluntary. 

As late as June 14, 171 1, Addison printed in The Spectator, 
No. 117, his famous essay on witchcraft. " I believe in general," 
he says, "that there is and has been such a thing as witchcraft, 
but at the same time can give no credit to any particular instances 
of it." The politic position taken by Montesquieu in his Esprit 
des Lois, 1747, livre xii, ch. v, was not very different from Addi- 
son's; and Blackstone puts himself under shelter of Addison 
and Montesquieu ; Commentaries, book iv, chapter iv. It was 
those who believed thus in evil spirits generally, but refused 
the evidence in particular cases, that Glanvill calls "nullibists" 
or no-where-ists. 

In Browne's Vulgar Errors, 148, it is set down to be con- 
sidered "whether the brains of Cats be attended with such 
destructive malignities as Dioscorides and others put upon them." 
See a passage on this subject in Parey's works, book 21, chap- 
ter xxxiv. It is to be remembered that though Par6 was not an 



Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists. 



47 



English writer, his works were translated into English and his 
name spelled Parey. 

I have not thought it necessary to fall into what Milton calls 
a " paroxysm of citations " on this subject. I have given authori- 
ties on specific points in passing, but the witch literature of the 
seventeenth century is oppressively vast. Some of the Continental 
writers are referred to in Scheltma's Heksenprocessen, others in 
Sprengel's Geschichte der Arzneikunde ; there is a list of English 
writers in the Retrospective Review, v, and the late Justin Winsor 
printed a pamphlet bibHography of American witchcraft. Fran- 
cis Hutchinson's work is the best on witchcraft generally. No 
subject within the scope of history can be more dreary to the 
student of original authorities, more revolting to humane feelings, 
or more disgusting in many of its details. Upham's Salem 
Witchcraft, with an account ot Salem village, is the only work on 
the witches in Salem on which one can depend. It has no chap- 
ters and no index worthy of the name, and is utterly exasperating, 
but it is a full account of the witchcraft ordered and made clear. 
Upham did not know how to make a book, he did not know the 
subtle laws of mind, but the external facts are well given. I 
have had recourse to nearly all the other data as well, from Cotton 
Mather and Calef down. 



Chap. I. 



Note 21, 
page 34. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND. 

DIGRESSION CONCERNING MEDICAL NOTIONS AT 
THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT. 



Chap. II. 

The circu- 
lation of 
the blood. 

Harvey's 
Prelectio- 
nes Anato- 
miae Uni- 
versalis, 
72-80, and 
Exercitatio 
de Motu 
Cordis, 
Frankfort, 
1628. 



Aubrey 
quoted in 
Prefatory 
Memoir to 
the reprint 
of Exerci- 
tatio. 

Comp. the 
Life by 
Willis in 
Harvey's 
works. 

Quoted by 
Folet in 
Moliere et 



To the historian of medicine the early seven- 
teenth century seems a period of brilliant dis- 
covery, for, in 1 6 16, while Virginia was yet in its 
birth throes, William Harvey first expounded to 
his students the circulation of the blood, which he 
published to the world twelve years later. But to 
the student of culture history the stubborn resist- 
ance offered to this capital discovery is one of the 
many signs of the thralldom of the age to tradition. 
So unusual was the spectacle of a man questioning 
the conclusions of the ancients that Harvey was 
accounted " crack-brained," his practice declined, 
and a pack of ** barking dogs," as he calls them, 
were soon baying at him. " Would you have us 
believe that you know something that Aristotle 
did not know ? " demanded one adversary. Dr. 
Primrose. " Aristotle observed everything," he 
adds, "and no one should dare to come after him," 
The voice of Primrose is the voice of that age. It 
is said that no man over forty years old accepted 
Harvey's new physiology. Half a century after 

Harvey's discovery the medical faculty of Paris, 

48 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



49 



noted for its spotless orthodoxy, solemnly peti- 
tioned the French king to prohibit the teaching of 
the circulation, as a doctrine contrary to the author- 
ity of Aristotle, Against the plated hulk of this 
conservatism Boileau let fly a broadside of derision 
in the shape of a burlesque decree, in which among 
other things the court " forbids the blood to be 
any longer vagabond, wandering and circulating 
about the body, on pain of being wholly given over 
to the faculty of Paris to be let without measure." 
Harvey " gave to anatomy its most illustrious dis- 
covery, . . . and to philosophy its first real alliance 
with experience," says a German writer, and we 
like to linger over the story of the most shining 
intellectual achievement of the century. But its 
relation to anatomical knowledge in America in 
the seventeenth century is small. It is probable 
that few of the earlier doctors and chirurg-eons 
who came to the colonies were interested in the 
question raised by Harvey. It is certainly im- 
probable that anything new in science ever came 
into possession of the barbers and bloodletters and 
bonesetters who practiced the rougher sort of sur- 
gery and physic in England and the pioneer settle- 
ments of America, nor would novelties of any sort 
influence the practice of traditional medicine by 
the preacher of the parish or some jack-at-all-trades 
who served as justice of the peace, medical adviser, 
and neighborhood wiseacre. Still less would there 
be any advance in that " kitchen physic," as the 
colonists were accustomed to call it, that was so 



Chap. II. 

la Mede- 
cine, 8i. 
Comp. 
Revue Sci- 
entifique, 
Nov., 1893, 
on La Cir- 
culation et 
ses Detrac- 
teurs. 

CEuvres de 
Boileau, 
ed. 1821, 
iii, 120. 
Earlier 
forrt; of the 
Arret Bur- 
lesque. 

Isensee, 
Geschichte 
der Mede- 
cin, I. 
Theil, 255. 



50 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. II. 



Subjects 
for Master's 
Degrees at 
Harvard, 
17- 



Humor- 
ism. 



Note I. 



Note 2. 
Aphorisms 
of Hippoc- 
rates. 
Paulus 
.lEgineta, 
b. vii, 
sec. 2. 
Comp. 
especially 
extracts 
from 
Aetius in 
Adams's 
Commen- 
tary on P. 
.^gineta, 



liberally dispensed by midwives and knowing- 
house mothers who revered neither Galen nor Hip- 
pocrates, but followed mediaeval traditions and 
employed remedies that may have been older than 
the father of medicine himself. In i66o the circu- 
lation of the blood was argued in a master's thesis 
at Harvard, which institution seems to have been 
about that time hospitable to new opinions in sci- 
ence. This was thirty-two years after Harvey's 
treatise had appeared. The circulation of the 
blood was still a question at Harvard in 1699. 



II. 

That which one age tells to another seems to 
men truth fundamental. From antiquity it had 
been told and retold with much formality that the 
human body consisted of four elements — earth, air, 
fire, and water — and that it contained just four 
humors or liquids corresponding neatly in number 
with the four elements. These humors were bile 
or choler, blood, melancholy or black bile, and 
phlegm. In the mystical science of that time a 
mysterious relation or correspondence was sup- 
posed to exist between each of the several ele- 
ments and one of the four humors. Anne Brad- 
street, the beginner of New England poetry, sets it 
forth in rhyme, that choler was the daughter of 
fire, blood of air, melancholy of earth, and phlegm 
of water. Disease came from an excess of one or 
another humor, or from a humor's being too cold 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



51 



or too hot, or too moist or too dry. The four 
humors, offspring of the four elements, had these 
four qualities, cold, heat, moisture, and dryness, 
which were something other than what we mean 
by these terms. Each of these qualities might 
exist in either one of four degrees of intensity, not 
only in the humors but in the food and remedies. 
A writer in 1603 estimates the possible mixtures 
and wrong-goings of the four humors at eighty 
thousand. This afforded a system of diagnosis 
fairly bewildering and impressive to the patient. 
The belief that the humors wrongly mixed or tem- 
pered affected the mood of a sufferer was a com- 
monplace of the literature of the period. " Humor 
. . . some time hath his hour with every man," says 
Shakespeare's Portia to Brutus. Certain forms of 
speech that gave expression to humoral theories 
still persist as petrifactions of extinct notions. 
The words humor, temperament, bilious, choleric, 
atrabilious, melancholy, phlegmatic, and others, are 
veritable fossils of the Galenic age. The numer- 
ous simples, such as sassafras and sarsaparilla, that 
are yet decocted to remove morbid humors and 
"purify the blood," are but remains of Galenism, 
and nostrums that restore health by invigorating 
the liver show the survival in folk-science of the 
old physiology that gave supremacy to that organ, 
or of the theory of ancient medicine that " the liver 
is made up from the roots of the veins " and that 
it was the center of life, the desires of the soul 
being there seated. 



Chap. II. 

Sydenham 
Soc, iii, 6, 
and old 
medical lit- 
erature 
generally. 



Note 3. 

Sprengel's 

Geschichte 

der Arz- 

neikunde, 

V. 251, 

citing 

Sanctorius. 

Julius 
Cssar, 



Note 4. 

For exam- 
ple, Are- 
taeus of 
Cappado- 
cia on 
Acute Dis- 
eases, ii, 
vii, Syden- 
ham Soc. 
edition. 



52 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



III. 

The physicians of the seventeenth century were 
acquainted with the properties of many valuable 
simples. They had a set of astringents and cathar- 
tics handed down from antiquity. Some of the 
latter are so drastic that nothing could have justi- 
fied their use but the necessity for evacuating hu- 
mors which had a depraved way of going wrong 
and sending up poisonous vapors to the brain, to 
the injury of those imaginary "animal spirits" 
which played a leading part in the physiology of 
the age. The several purgative remedies were 
supposed to act specifically, each on one or more 
particular humor ; one thing was needed for 
phlegm and quite another to remove the black 
bile that weighed on the spirits of a hypochon- 
driac. The favorite and perhaps the most de- 
structive remedy of that time was venesection. 
Hippocrates had used it with caution, thinking it 
best in the spring time. Galen forbade bloodletting 
in the case of persons under fourteen or over sev- 
enty years old. But in the seventeenth century it 
was inflicted on men, women, and children for 
almost every pathological offense. Louis XIII 
was bled forty-seven times in twelve months. In- 
fants of three days and men past eighty were thus 
depleted : the " peccant " humors had to be ex- 
pelled. Venesection was supposed to be local in 
its effects and a vein was opened in the head for 
troubles in the head. The French when depleting 



Coticerning Medical Notions. 



53 



generally opened a vein on each side of the body, 
supposing in their ignorance of the circulation that 
otherwise it would require twenty-four hours to 
restore by some process an equilibrium. The 
great surgeon Pare drew seven pounds of blood, 
troy weight, from a man in four days ; and there 
was a case in England of almost as severe a treat- 
ment inflicted on a man seventy-six years of age. 
Bleeding was used by barbers and other humble 
practitioners. In the American colonies it was 
practiced by the half-taught chirurgeon, as well as 
by clergymen and other medical amateurs and 
dabblers, to whom the old almanacs pointed out 
the proper time of the moon for letting blood 
according to the age of the patient. 



IV. 

The great medical controversies which the early 
seventeenth century had received by way of legacy 
from past ages wakened few echoes in America. 
The Latin countries generally held to Greek and 
Arabian traditions, while the Germans were fol- 
lowing the insurgent Paracelsus and the chemical 
school — doctors of fire, or pyrotechnics, as they 
called themselves. But the seventeenth century 
was a period of approach and attempted reconcilia- 
tion. Pott, the English physician who was sent to 
Virginia in its early years, was thought all the bet- 
ter qualified because he had studied in the Low 
Countries, and was acquainted with chemistry. He 



Chap. II. 

Comp. 
C. Spren- 
gell on 
the Sen- 
tences of 
Celsus, 
passim. 
Howell's 
Letters, i, 
2, Letter 



Note 6. 

Parey 

(Pare), 
works, 
lib. lo, c. 
xiv, and 
Deodati's 
Letter in 
Appx. to 
Hakewill. 
Compare 
Medicine in 
Mass., 43. 



Medical 
sects. 



Spreng^el, 
Geschichte 
der Arz- 
neikunde, 
iv, 341. 
note. 
Browne's 
Vulgar 
Errors, 72. 



54 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap 


II. 


Hakewill's 


Apol., 


iii, 


V, pp. 


244, 


245- 





J. Clayton 
to Royal 
Society. 



See Force's 
reprint. 

William 
and Mary 
Qrly., ii, 
170. MS. 
county rec- 
ords in Va. 
State Li- 
brary gen- 
erally. 

J. W. 
Deane's 
Sketch of 
Wiggles- 
worth. In- 
ventories 
of books 
generally. 



appears to have combined Galenical with the chem- 
ical methods, and there were other eclectics at the 
time. Some stiff Galenists in England were sus- 
pected of using spagyric methods surreptitiously. 
If any allusion to medical sects was made in the 
newly planted colonies, no record of it has come 
down to us ; the people, in their necessities, availed 
themselves eagerly of any science or promising 
quackery or ignorant folk-physic that offered re- 
lief, reserving all their polemics for theology. One 
finds remedies dating back to Galen and Hip- 
pocrates standing on the family medicine shelf of 
nearly every plantation house of Virginia ; the Ori- 
ental bezoar stone of somebody in the middle ages 
and the ancient dittany of the Greeks were pre- 
scribed by colonial doctors. But in the little med- 
ical libraries Glauber's Chemistry holds up its head 
alongside of Galen's Art of Physic, and even the 
Unlearned Chemist ventures to keep company 
with Ambrose Fare's Surgery. In New England, 
as in Virginia, Barrough's Method of Phisicke was 
the accepted handbook for nearly a hundred years. 
Wigglesworth had Barrough with Harvey and 
Culpepper ; but it is significant that several Para- 
celsian books, such as the Basilica Chymica, were 
their friendly shelf neighbors. One is forced to 
conclude from the collections of books that colo- 
nial medicine at least was rather inclusive. Gov- 
ernor Winthrop, of Connecticut, whose influence 
must have modified medical practice in New Eng- 
land, appears to have belonged to the chemical 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



55 



school, and to have held strongly to hermetic 
medicine of various kinds. 



The doctrine of signatures, so often ascribed to 
Paracelsus and strongly upheld by him, pervaded 
medical theory in the colonies. The notion was, 
indeed, as old as Hippocrates himself, and prob- 
ably yet more ancient, since it is found in the 
primitive medical theory of savages. But writers 
of the Paracelsian school of the sixteenth century 
amplified, emphasized, intricated, and mysticized 
the doctrine in such a way as to make it seem 
almost an original discovery of their own time. 
Theories were accepted in that day for poetic 
rather than scientific reasons. Whatever thought 
was reached by symbolism, or uttered obscurely 
or mystically, impressed the susceptible imagina- 
tion of the age. The imagination then held the 
place of authority that rightly belongs to the 
judgment. The later and elaborate doctrine of 
signatures was a part of the prevalent philosophy 
of correspondences. It was related to the influence 
of the planets on plants and minerals, which influ- 
ence was shown by color and other qualities and 
had to do with medical properties. It was a part 
also of an obscure theory of sympathy and antipa- 
thy existing in inanimate things — a doctrine sug- 
gested apparently by the magnet. It belonged to 
the overshadowing supernaturalism of the time, 
5 



Chap. II. 



Signatur- 
istn. 

Note 7. 



Note 8. 



56 



The Transit of Civilization. 



and to the geocentric and homocentric notions of 
the universe that gave value to things only in their 
relation to man. The world was a cosmic phar- 
macy ; God had placed a signature on each sub- 
stance to indicate the disease it was good for. 
What was necessary was to read the label, to note 
the indications of odor, color, form, and other 
marks. The resemblance was often wholly exter- 
nal. " Like by like is to be cured — that is, similar 
ulcers by similar forms," says Paracelsus. The 
porosity of the leaves of St. John's-wort, and the 
spots which resembled perforations of the leaf, left 
no doubt of the value of the plant in all cases of 
abrasion, external or internal. The illusory ap- 
pearance of holes in its leaves showed it good for 
hallucinations, madness, and assaults of the devil. 
This curious theory of medicine is to be detected 
in many of the remedies prescribed in the colonies, 
and is yet more evident in the popular modes of 
healing. 

VI. 

We may see the influence of the theory of sig- 
natures on English medicine in actual transit to the 
colonies by examining a paper sent by Dr. Stafford, 
of London, to Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, 
the most noted master of medicine in the early 
colonial period. In this paper are remedies which 
must have been often prescribed in New England. 
Stafford cured " madnesse " with St. John's-wort 
" sometimes in five days." Paracelsus had treated 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



57 



the fibers of its leaves as a signature, showing that 
this plant was good to drive away " phantasms 
and specters." But the doctrine of ** curing by the 
assimulate " was perhaps present even in supersti- 
tions before the time of Paracelsus ; the water of 
St. John's-wort was used to drive away devils, and 
the herbs St, John's-wort and rue were blessed 
after a prescribed form, wrapped in a " hallowed 
paper," and carried about "to be smelled at" 
against all " invasions of the devil." The inhab- 
itants of North Wales put sprigs of it over their 
doors as an antidote to demons. Stafford gave 
sweet milk with salt for "jaunders." Milk, being 
white, cleared black humors. This was " contra- 
ries cured by contraries," but Stafford used both 
methods in one remedy ; he added saffron to his 
milk and salt for jaundice, and this was " curing by 
the assimulate," a yellow remedy for a yellow dis- 
ease. If a patient were torn by pains in the breast 
or limbs, Stafford cured like by like ; he bade him 
wear a " wild catt's skin on the place grieved." But 
our London doctor's masterpiece, as communicated 
to Connecticut, appears to have been his "black 
powder " against smallpox and other eruptive dis- 
eases. It was made of toads because toads were 
believed to be poisonous, and all poison drew poi- 
son to itself, and thus cured disease, as the author 
of the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony had long 
before proved. This also was one mode of curing 
by the assimulate. But the warts on the toad were 
perhaps regarded as a specific divine indorsement 



Chap. II. 

Paracelsus, 
Opera, fol. 
191 ff. 
The Book 
of Quinte 
Essence, 
E. E. Text 
Soc, p. 19. 



Hall's 
Cases of 
Consc, 
Dec. 3, 
Case I, 
citing- The- 
saurum 
Exorcis- 
morum. 

Barton's 
Med. and 
Phys. Jour- 
nal, May, 
i, pt. ii, 
60. 



Note 9. 



Compare 

Adams's 

Paulus 

^gineta, 

ii, 207. 

Basilius 

Valenti- 

nus. 



58 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. II. 



Note lo. 



O. W. 

Holmes, 
Mass. Hist. 
Soc. Proc, 
1862, pp. 
379-382. 



■Weapon 
ointment 
and sym- 
pathetic 
powder. 



of his value against eruptions. " In the month of 
March," says Stafford, with the usual particularity 
of time, " take toads as many as you will alive ; 
putt them in an earthen pott, so that it may be half 
full ; cover it with a broad tyle or Iron plate ; then 
overwhelme the pott so that the bottome may be 
uppermost ; putt charcoales round about it and 
over it. . . . Sett it on fire and lett it burne out 
and extinguish of itselfe ; when it is cold take out 
the toades; and in an Iron mortar pound them very 
well." By a second roasting this brown toad pow- 
der was reduced to a black, innocuous animal char- 
coal. " Moderate the dose according to the strength 
of the partie," says Stafford gravely. A toad boiled 
in oil, " after the toad has fasted two or three days," 
he recommends for king's evil. With an exacti- 
tude characteristic of the medicine of the day he 
mixes a plaster not with simple hog's lard, but 
with " barrow's grease." Subtlety of this sort per- 
vaded every department of thought ; the little that 
was known of science had rather dazed than clari- 
fied vision. 

VII. 

Beside the doctrine of signatures and a super- 
stitious etiquette in the preparation of remedies, 
there were other curious results of the mystical 
tendency in the medicine of the time — the weapon 
ointment derived from the Rosicrucians, for ex- 
ample. It was compounded of many absurdities ; 
there was pulverized bloodstone, a cure by likes, 



Concer?iing Medical Notions. 



59 



and there was also moss taken from the skull of a 
dead man unburied and other ghastly ingredients. 
This precious unguent was applied, not to the 
wound, but to the weapon or implement that had 
produced it. The weapon was then carefully 
bandaged, to protect it from the air. It was the 
wound, however, that was healed ; the cures are 
well attested, as impossible cures usually are. Ex- 
periment proved that " a more homely and familiar 
ointment " would serve the turn just as well, and 
moreover, in that day of emblemism, the ointment 
proved quite as efficacious when applied to an 
image of the offending weapon. To the Rosicru- 
cians was attributed also a similar cure which 
came into great notoriety in England in the middle 
of the seventeenth century. This was the widely 
famous sympathetic powder made of vitriol with 
much ceremonial precision. The powder stopped 
haemorrhages either from disease or wounds. It 
was applied to the blood after it had issued from 
the wound or to the blood-stained garment. 
Winthrop, of Connecticut, imported the latest 
books on the subject of this powder, which may 
well have come into use in a new country where 
surgical cases were not infrequent. Before Win- 
throp's time, and after, German writers on medicine 
attempted to give a scientific basis to the weapon 
ointment and powder of sympathy by attributing 
their operation to magnetism, a term that has 
covered more ignorance than any other ever in- 
vented. The philosopher Kenelm Digby, a con- 



Chap. II. 
Note II. 



Sprengel, 
Geschichte 
der Arz- 
neikunde, 
iv, 345. 



E. g., De 
Pulvere 
Sympa- 
thetica, 
1650. 



Sprengel, 
as above, 
iv, 345. 346. 



Note 12. 



The Transit of Civilizatio7i. 



temporary of Winthrop, made himself the protag- 
onist of the powder in a treatise on the subject. 
Lord Bacon was in some doubt about the weapon 
ointment, but he rather inclined to believe in its 
cures, because a distinguished lady had similarly 
relieved him of warts by rubbing them with a rind 
of pork, which was then hung up, fat side to the 
sun, to waste vicariously away, carrying his warts 
into non-existence with it. Roberti, the Jesuit, be- 
lieved that such cures took place, but ascribed 
them to the devil ; all these cures that were 
wrought without "contaction," including the home- 
made witchcraft for curing warts, Bishop Hall 
accounted damnable sorceries. Of such necro- 
mancy, this cure of warts with a rind of pork has 
alone survived to modern times. The rag-bag of 
folk-medicine is filled with the cast-ofif clothes of 
science. 

VIII. 

The seventeenth century lay in the penumbra of 
the middle ages, and the long-sought potable gold 
of the alchemists was yet in request ; it even 
enjoyed a revival. Almost everything precious 
and rare was accounted of medicinal virtue, and 
it was inferred that gold as the most precious 
metal would be the most valuable remedy if it 
could be taken in liquid form. The known use- 
fulness of mercurial remedies was attributed to 
the fact that mercury was the densest of liquids. 
Gold was the densest metal then known, and it 



Concerninz Medical Notions. 



6i 



was easily decided, by the process of using fancy 
to give fluidity to logic, that if it could be reduced 
to drinkable consistency it would be the most 
valuable of medicaments. There was a yet more 
convincing way of proving its medicinal value 
by the process of presumption, so much used by 
hermetic philosophers. The sun and gold were 
related in the mystical thought of the time ; the 
sun as chief luminary was " lord in the property " 
of gold. " There is not found among things above 
or things beneath," says Glauber, " a greater har- 
mony and friendship than that between the sun, 
gold, man, and wine." The easy logic of the time 
found in this transcendental fancy a "therefore" 
potent enough to make gold a universal remedy for 
human maladies, where the recovery was not " con- 
trary to the unfathomable counsel of God." Gold 
was even administered in its solid state ; Arabic 
doctors had prescribed leaf gold, and it held place 
in several compounds. Fragments and leaves of 
gold were seethed with meats, and the broth used 
to clear the heart and raise the strength and vital 
spirits of invalids beyond all conception. But the 
hermetic writers thought the use of leaf gold a 
coarse application of a metal which they were fond 
of styling " the lower Sun." Preparations profess- 
ing to be potable gold and tincture of gold were 
in much request and frequently administered in the 
seventeenth century. On the other hand, their 
eflhcacy was warmly debated. The alchemists held 
that three drops at the highest taken in wine or 



The Transit of Civilization. 



beer would cure the most serious illness. Of its 
nature it is more than enough for us to know that 
it was triplex, being vegetable, animal, and min- 
eral ; it was one thing chosen out of all others, 
of a livid color, metallic, limpid and fluid, hot and 
moist, watery and swarthy, a living oil and a liv- 
ing tincture, a mineral stone and a water of life 
of wonderful efficacy. So spake the admiring 
alchemist. 

John Winthrop the younger, of whom we have 
spoken, was a man of an eager and curious mind, 
fond of peering into the occult. He dabbled in 
alchemy as well as astrology, and on his shelves 
were many of the latest works on potable gold. 
A poet of his time says of him : 

Were there a Balsam, which all wounds could cure, 
'Twas in this Asculapian hand be sure. 

He left a son Wait who inherited his father's fond- 
ness for prescribing, and who like his father was 
an adept in panaceas, and was believed to have 
golden secrets and secrets more precious than gold, 
" unknown to Hippocrates and Helmont." Doubt- 
less many New-Englanders were dosed by the 
revered Winthrops with the tincture of the sun, 
potable gold, made by marrying in some fashion 
the " masculine gold " to the " feminine mercury," 
and possessing all virtues — vegetable, mineral, and 
animal — " destroying the Root and Seminaries of 
all malignant and poisonous diseases." 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



65 



IX. 

Weapon ointment, sympathetic powder, potable 
gold, were much thought of, but the authorized 
pharmacopoeias ignored these Gothic medicines 
that traced their origin to alchemists and Rosicru- 
cians. Yet the notion of a universal antidote was 
in regular medicine as well. Primitive science, 
having no reins on the imagination, longs for per- 
fection, seeks the universal, and dreams of great 
discoveries. Back through a long line of medical 
writers we may trace the belief in the virtues of 
theriac and mithridate to Galen and into the cen- 
turies before Galen. The accepted story of its 
origin is that Mithridates, King of Pontus, by a 
series of experiments on criminals, had found out, 
or thought he had found out, what medicaments 
would neutralize various poisons. These he put 
together for a universal antidote. Andromachus, 
physician to Nero, changed the constitution of the 
remedy somewhat, adding the flesh of the viper, 
probably on the principle of curing like by like. 
This remedy of Andromachus was the famous 
theriac which was so much lauded by Galen and 
which imposed itself even on modern times. It 
was expelled from the British Pharmacopoeia only 
in the middle of the eighteenth century by a bare 
majority of one vote in the college. It contained 
more than sixty ingredients, and was commonly 
known in England as Venice treacle. Not only all 
poisons but many diseases were supposed to be 



64 



The Transit of Civilization. 



conquerable by this universal remedy. Numerous 
other preparations of viper's flesh were in use ; 
things poisonous were thought to contain much 
virtue. What theriac was used in the colonies 
was no doubt made abroad. In less complicated 
preparations the American rattlesnake was made 
to take the place held for thousands of years by its 
rival in virulence, the European viper. The fiesh 
of the rattlesnake was fed to the infirm, perhaps in 
broths as the viper was given for ages, and as the 
Scotch used the adder. His gall mixed with chalk 
was made into " snake balls " and given internally ; 
his heart was dried and powdered and drunk in 
wine or beer to cure the venom of the snake, on 
the ancient principle of curing by likes. In Vir- 
ginia the oil of the snake was recommended for 
gout, while in frosty New England the fat was, 
if we may believe Josselyn, " very sovraign for 
frozen limbs . . . and sprains." The American 
backwoodsman of to-day, perhaps unconsciously, 
uses a homely substitute for the viper wine or 
theriacal wine of other times when he soaks the 
flesh of the rattlesnake in spirits to make " bitters " 
against rheumatism. 



There was yet another universal antidote rec- 
ognized in the regular medicine of the time. The 
bezoar or bezar stone was a concretion taken from 
the intestines of wild goats and other animals. 
That brought from the Orient was accounted most 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



65 



valuable. It was used at first in the East as an 
amulet ; there were other remedies of olden times 
that served their purpose just as well when worn 
about the person as when taken medicinally. A 
" stone " found in so unusual a place excited 
wonder, and there grew up a mythical notion of 
its origin. This particular wild goat, in the opin- 
ion of the sixteenth century, indulged itself on 
occasion in a diet of poisonous snakes. To cool 
the burning produced in its stomach by this de- 
bauch, the creature plunged into the water. On 
coming out it sought and ate of health-giving 
herbs, and as a result the bezoar was concreted in 
its vitals. The cost of the bezoar, the " queen 
of poisons," was great. " If you take too much, 
your purse will soon complain," says a medical 
writer in 1661. The concretions of the "mountain 
goat " were the original bezoar, but any intestinal 
formation of the kind came to be considered 
bezoar. In Java the viscera of the porcupine were 
eagerly searched for such deposits, and one of 
these worthless things called a pedro porco was 
sold for the price of pearls. There were ru- 
minants in Chili and Peru that yielded bezoars, 
which ranked second to those of the East ; Mexico 
contributed a lower grade still. Finding these 
stones valuable, the shrewd Indians learned to 
counterfeit them, and as they were of all sizes, 
colors, and forms, and there was no test of fineness, 
there were others than natives who knew how to 
sophisticate, so that the famous powder magisterial 



66 



The Transit of Civilization. 



of bezoar often probably contained nothing- of 
the kind. The remedy was used in the colonies. 
Clayton, the parson who was in Virginia before 
1690, tells of a skillful woman physician there who 
gave pulverized " oriental bezoar stone " in the 
case of a man bitten by a rattlesnake and followed 
it with a decoction of dittany, the same at least in 
name with that ancient remedy which Venus ap- 
plied to the wound of her son ^neas, and to which 
the wild goats in those knowing times resorted 
when the winged arrows of the hunters were stick- 
ing in their sides. We get a notion of the persist- 
ence of medical tradition when we find admin- 
istered in Virginia an antidote brought into Eu- 
rope from the East in the middle ages and an 
orthodox simple derived from the remotest Greek 
antiquity, and both of them probably without merit. 



XI. 

This magic of dittany has much instruction for 
us who study the genesis of colonial medicine. 
Not only Cretan dittany, but white dittany as 
well, was esteemed efificacious against the poison 
of " serpents, mad dogs, and venomous beasts." 
Medical theory was very expansive. Because the 
plant that grew on the Cretan mountain sides was 
fabled to expel the barbed arrows that remained 
in the wounds of the wild goats, Cretan dittany and 
white dittany were accounted potent not only to 
cure poison, but to extract bits of wood or bone 



Concerjiinz Medical Notions. 



^7 



from wounds, and to remove foreign bodies of all 
sorts, and even to assist in parturition. Dittany 
was such an antagonist to poison that Gerarde is 
quoted as saying, " The very smell driveth away 
venomous beasts, and doth astonish them." 
Whether the Virginia doctors mentioned in the 
preceding section cured the rattlesnake's bite by 
using Cretan or white dittany, or perhaps by nei- 
ther, is not certain, for by a curious process the 
name and virtues of dittany had before this time 
been transferred to American pennyroyal, which 
appears to have been still more astonishing to a 
snake than dittany. Captain Silas Taylor told the 
learned Royal Society, ever eager in that day to 
hear of marvelous discoveries from returning trav- 
elers, that in 1657 he had held to the nose of an 
unwilling rattlesnake the bruised leaves of " wild 
pennyroyal, or dittany, of Virginia." The serpent 
was killed by the antidote in half an hour. Other 
virtues of dittany were ascribed to pennyroyal in 
New York ; here it was also used against rattle- 
snakes. But the name dittany, or American dit- 
tany, was presently settled by early Virginia bot- 
anists on Ctinila Americana, and the miraculous vir- 
tues ascribed to Cretan dittany anciently, and later 
to European species and to pennyroyal, were finall}^ 
attached to the so-called American dittany. 

It was by such processes that many American 
herbs became medicinal. A fancied resemblance 
caused the name of a European plant to be trans- 
ferred, sometimes to more than one American spe- 



68 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. II. 
Note 22. 

Glover to 
Royal So- 
ciety, 
Abridg- 
ment, iii, 
570. 



Two Voy- 
ages to 
New Eng- 
land, 61. 



Botanical 
researches 

Comp. 
Tiraboschi, 
Storia della 
Lettera- 
tura Ital- 
iana, xiv, 
424, 431. 
Note 23. 

Compare 
Latham's 
Life of 
Sydenham, 



cies, and with the name was carried over the tra- 
ditional virtues. Favorite herbs were transplanted 
from English gardens to those of colonial house 
mothers, who even took pains to cultivate in 
America the wild plants they had been wont to 
pluck for simples from English hedgerows. But 
the seeds of English weeds emigrated by smug- 
gling themselves with better company, and the 
hardy vagabonds of English roadsides gained an 
easy advantage over the feebler natives of the 
American banks. Herbs from Europe soon put 
on the airs of native Americans. There was no 
lack, therefore, of old acquaintances for simples, 
and the wild woods were full of new plants and 
animals presumed to be of pharmaceutical value, 
for the idealism of the time denied that anything 
was superfluous. " We have the Scriptures to 
back it," says Josselyn, " that God created nothing 
in vain." 

XII. 

The search for new remedies in the bewilder- 
ing jumble of hitherto unknown plants revealed by 
the discovery of America gave a new interest to 
botany, which was the foremost of the biological 
sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies. Jesuit missionaries in South America 
learned from the natives the medicinal value of the 
bark of the cinchona tree, in 1632, and it was at 
length introduced into European medicine. This 
was the greatest trophy of botanical research in 



Conccrnins' Medical Notions. 



69 



the New World, though the Old World met the 
discovery with stubborn prejudice and resistance. 
The brilliant results achieved in malarial diseases 
by the use of Jesuits' or Peruvian bark after its 
general introduction into Europe, about the mid- 
dle of the century, probably awakened expectation 
of similar discoveries in North America. The 
traveler Josselyn, who arrived in New England in 
1663, was an assiduous herb gatherer ; he exam- 
ined the weeds and woods and wild beasts to 
find novel remedies, and he has recorded for us 
the popular applications of many new substances. 
Glover, and Clayton the parson, and the botanist 
Bannister, were observing Virginia plants in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century. In the 
eighteenth there were several eminent native bot- 
anists, and others came from Europe. To three of 
these — Kalm, a Swede ; Schopf, a German ; and 
Castiglione, an Italian — we owe the most careful 
observations, not only of the plants but of social 
conditions in America. 



XIII. 

But the popular use of American plants and 
animals did not depend on botanical research. 
The general belief was that all things were made 
with reference to man. The wild woods were full 
of creatures whose value was written on each of 
them in the language of signatures, if the seeker 
for simples could only manage to decipher the 



Chap. II. 


p. Ixxv ff. 


Comp. 


CEuvres de 


Bayle, i, 


267, 268. 



Note 24. 



Signatur- 
ism in 
America. 



70 



The Transit of Civilization. 



label with which it had been considerately tagged 
at the creation. If we look into Josselyn's list of 
American remedies, we shall see how much painful 
observation and investigation had been saved by 
this shopkeeper scheme of Nature. The bark of 
the board-pine was naturally good for the skin ; 
rosin gathered on the bark was used for outward 
application; turpentine procured by incisions was 
" excellent to heal wounds and cuts." Even cos- 
metic applications were probably suggested in the 
same way ; green pine cones having a corrugated 
surface were good to remove wrinkles from the 
face ; water distilled from them was " laid on with 
cloths." The familiar kidney bean, first known to 
Europeans in the gardens of the American sav- 
ages, was " good to strengthen the kidneys," as 
anybody might know at sight. The signature 
might be " internal " as well as external, and very 
opposite deductions were sometimes made. The 
French thought that the mottled eggs of the 
American turkey bred leprosy, but the English 
colonists thought that the similar eggs of the tur- 
key buzzard were able to " restore decayed na- 
ture exceedingly." From some association of 
symbolism the brains of the shark and jelly from 
the head of the drumfish were thought to assist in 
obstetric cases. Brickell, a medical man, records 
the fact that the pit of the Carolina haw was 
thought serviceable in cases of " the stone, gravel, 
and dropsy," and he recommends the brains of the 
screech owl for headache. As in Europe signatur- 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



71 



ism would seem to have had its first lodgment in 
the superstitious use of amulets, so in America like 
cured like when merely worn about the person. 
In New England the fangs of wolves were strung 
about the necks of children to save them from 
fright ; and the cast-off skin of the rattlesnake was 
worn as a girdle to facilitate parturition. The 
practice must have been pretty general, since we 
find it in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. No 
doubt the custom which still obtains in malarial 
regions of wearing a necklace of caterpillars to 
cure ague by shuddering, antedates the discovery 
of Peruvian bark. In the seventeenth century a 
spider inclosed in a nutshell, wrapped in silk and 
hung about the neck so as to touch the skin, " did 
much to drive away intermittent fevers more 
quickly." In England the patient was sometimes 
dosed with the spider, and the practice is still 
known in English folk-medicine. In the valley of 
the Ohio, spider-web pills are given by rustics to 
cure ague. The use of spiders in some form 
against intermittents is more than two thousand 
years old ; Greek physicians, before the beginning 
of the Christian era, put a plaster of them on the 
patient's forehead. 

It is to be remembered that in the ages before 
science it was held that in case of recovery there 
must have been a remedy. Nothing got well of 
itself. Now we know that the great majority of 
ills will heal themselves. In every case of spon- 
taneous healing in that time a remedy was looked 



72 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



for, and so nearly everything was believed to be a 
remedy for something. 

XIV. 

Many remedies were in use in the early colo- 
nial practice and in Europe that seem to have had 
nothing to recommend them except an unconfessed 
notion that disgust was curative, and the belief that 
nothing was made in vain. Pulverized butterflies, 
crickets, and grasshoppers are not the worst of 
these by several degrees. Sowbugs were highly 
esteemed ; earwigs and emmets, which sometimes 
crept into the ears, were good for deafness and 
were given in oil ; tumblebugs for some reason 
cured rabies, and bedbugs were valuable in lying- 
in cases, perhaps from their clinical associations. 
Even more intimate vermin were given alone or 
put into compounds. The skins, the viscera, and 
the dejecta of animals were in use, and many of the 
most loathsome of these substances were found in 
the regular pharmacopoeias. Human orts and ends 
were highly prized ; the volatile salt of men's 
bones was especially " homogeneal to humane na- 
ture"; the scrapings of human skulls, human fat, 
and the liquid called mummy distilled from dead 
bodies were devoutly believed to have much effi- 
cacy. It was only as time wore on that organic 
chemistry arose to deliver the afflicted from the 
nauseous and the noxious by dumping whole phar- 
macopoeias of vile medicament into the homoge- 
neal sewers. 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



n 



XV. 

The colonists fell into a common error of un- 
scientific men : they overestimated the value of the 
medical hocus-pocus of the savages. In Pennsyl- 
vania they were, in 1696, pronounced " as able 
physicians as any in Europe." Indian physic was 
in great part empty jugglery against imaginary 
spirits, but in rough-and-ready surgery the savages 
had some arts useful in the exigencies of forest 
life. They had herbs for cathartics and emetics ; 
they taught the colonists the use of various roots 
which they believed to be antidotes for the bite of 
the rattlesnake. Byrd is able to name nearly a 
dozen of these supposed antidotes. One of these, 
the so-called Seneca snakeroot, came into great 
reputation in Europe as a general medicine. John 
Clayton the clergyman collected three hundred 
species of plants used as remedies by the Indians. 
Quacks in the colonies soon learned the trick of 
claiming to have medical secrets from the medicine 
men of the Indians. As early as the beginning of 
the eighteenth century this cloak for ignorance 
and imposture was found convenient, and the " In- 
dian " or " botanical " doctor was already plying 
his trade. 

XVI. 

It was the usual practice to send out with each 
" plantation " or settlement a surgeon who knew 
some physic. One of these was allowed in 1619 



74 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. II. 

Smith of 

Nibley 

MSS. 



Comp., for 
example, 
Accomac 
Records, 

passim, 
and York 
Records, 
163S, 1639, 
and 1645. 

Note 29. 



MSS. Rec- 
ords, Ac- 
comac 
County. 



thirty shillings a month. As money then went, 
thirty shillings would be equal to nearly as many 
dollars now. Dr. Pott, a Master of Arts, and both 
chemist and Galenist in training, a somewhat reck- 
less liver, a councilor, and for a short time a tem- 
porary governor, was the only physician in Vir- 
ginia in 1630. Involved in the factional intrigues 
of the time, only his medical skill saved him from 
being hanged out of hand for theft by the arbi- 
trary Sir John Harvey. Harvey could not muster 
courage to put to death the only competent med- 
ical man in the whole colony in a time of epidemic. 
A like indispensableness probably saved Pratt, a 
surgeon of Cambridge, Mass., from banishment 
for free speaking. There were in Virginia a good 
many rough practitioners of one sort or another ; 
in the manuscript county record books of this 
early period they are called " chirurgeons." The 
barber, who practiced minor surgery along with 
shaving and hairdressing, was a natural out- 
growth of the conditions existing in the middle 
as-es. But conditions had changed, and the bar- 
ber surgeon was in a fair way of extinction from 
unsuitableness to environment when the colonies 
were settled. In 1638 a barber surgeon lost his 
life journeying from Boston to Roxbury in a snow- 
storm to pull a tooth. In a Virginia inventory of 
1640 sixteen kinds of drugs are mixed up with a 
hone, a razor, a lancet, and four other implements 
of a surgical barber. In 1652 the surgeons of New 
Amsterdam petitioned for the exclusive right to 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



75 



shave. But a trade profession so widely bifurcated 
could not survive the first generation in a new 
country. The settler probably shaved himself in 
preference to seeking a surgeon to do it, and the 
barber improved his social rank by putting away 
his razor and hone and setting up in his medical 
capacity only. As the higher ranks of the pro- 
fession were mostly unoccupied, the very word 
surgeon as a professional distinction disappeared 
from general use in America. Every smatterer 
breveted himself physician to fill the vacancy. 
The so-called bonesetters, of whom we hear very 
early in New England, must have had predecessors 
in the mother country. Men with no professional 
training and little education, they appear to have 
been expert in the mere joiner work of surgery, as 
their title implies. The art was often transmitted 
from father to son, and was sometimes believed to 
be a natural and hereditary gift. In 1652 the Con- 
necticut General Court employed one of these men 
for the colony. This appointment of a bonesetter- 
general indicates the rarity of surgeons in the 
country when those of the first generation had dis- 
appeared. Six years later Boston felt some alarm 
at the number of people resorting thither for " help 
in physic and surgery," and took measures to pre- 
vent the town from becoming responsible for the 
support of any of these patients. Clayton gives an 
unflattering account of Virginia physicians in the 
latter part of the century. They were, no doubt, 
like all the colonial medical men of the time, mere 



76 



The Transit of Civilization. 



country-bred doctors, with the training that could 
be got from an apprenticeship to the half-educated 
surgeons, their predecessors. Their standard rem- 
edy was " crocus metallorum," which indeed, says 
Clayton, " every house keeps, and if their finger, as 
the saying is, ake but, they give three or four 
spoonfuls ; if this fail, they give him a second dose, 
then purge them with fifteen or twenty grains of 
Rosin of Jalap, afterwards sweat them with Venice 
Treacle, Powder of Snake Root or Gascoin's Pow- 
der." These failing, the case was given up. 



XVII. 

From remote times it fell to the lot of the 
priest, as the only educated man in the parish, to 
give medical advice ; so that medicine was at one 
time almost wholly in the hands of the clergy and 
women. This mediaeval usage cast its shadow 
across the following centuries, and some of the 
clergy who came to America had a fair acquaint- 
ance with the medical knowledge of the time. 
Robert Paulet, who was sent to Virginia as a par- 
son in 1619, appears to have been highly esteemed 
as a physician ; he refused a place in the govern- 
or's council because he could not be spared by the 
people of his region. Many of the ministers in 
New England practiced phvsic, some of them pro- 
fessionally, others apparently gratuitously. There 
were few educated men in New England or Vir- 
ginia who did not keep a few medical books and 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



77 



perhaps prescribe for their neighbors. Women 
had for ages practiced medicine. The dependents 
in the country houses and the tenants on the es- 
tates in England and in Europe generally looked 
to the wife of the master for medical advice. The 
same conditions persisted until recently on the 
large plantations in the Southern States, where the 
mistress was obliged to have her little stock of 
drugs and her ready traditional rule of prescrip- 
tion for the ordinary maladies. Professional women 
physicians were not uncommon. In country places 
in England the "good woman," as she was called, 
still lingered ; she was ** a pretended physician, 
chirurgeon, and blesser." She claimed especial 
skill in counteracting the mischief wrought by 
witches and demons, and this part of her art was 
sometimes called " white witchcraft." Obstetric 
cases were wholly in the hands of midwives in the 
earlier colonial period. It was just about this time 
that Dr. Peter Chamberlen attempted to organize 
women practitioners of midwifery in England into 
a company, with himself at their head as president 
and examiner. As early as 1655 a midwife was 
officially appointed in New Amsterdam and a 
house erected for her. The same class of practi- 
tioners were in the other colonies, and it was with 
difficulty that physicians could acquire a portion of 
the obstetric practice at a later time. There was 
also a class of women practitioners in many places 
who did not confine themselves to any one branch 
of practice and who gave the officinal remedies of 



Chap. II. 

Roy. 
Comm. 
Gawdy 
MSS., p. 
144 and 
others. 



Roll of 
Royal Coll. 
of Physi- 
cians, i, 
195- 

Calendar 
of Dutch 
MSS., 148. 
O'Calla- 
ghan, New 
Nether- 
land, 155. 
Comp. 
Sewall's 
Diary, i, 
preface, 
xiii, and 
page 166. 

Comp. 
Watson's 
Annals of 
N. Y., 205. 



78 



The Transit of Civilization. 



the time. Clayton mentions one such doctress in 
Virginia ; Byrd at a later period alludes to another. 
There is a record that this latter, a Mrs. Living- 
ston, of Fredericksburg, was paid a thousand pounds 
of tobacco by the parish of St. George " for sali- 
vating a poor woman, and promising to cure her 
again if she should be sick again in twelve Months." 
In some cases like those of the famous Mrs. Hutch- 
inson, of Boston, the services of a gentlewoman 
versed in obstetric practice were freely given to 
her neighbors ; the professional doctress of Block 
Island at a later period was the wife of a rich man. 
The practice of general medicine by women pre- 
vailed in England at the time, and came down 
from it is hard to say what antiquity, for one of 
the most famous of all the medical professors of 
Europe in the eleventh century was a woman. 



XVIII. 

Colonial medicine declined in character from 
the beginning. The physicians of the second 
generation, like the magistrates and clergymen, 
had much less education than those who came 
from England. Besides their lack of general cul- 
ture they had no proper training ; the surgeon 
sent to Massachusetts in 1629 was obligated to 
take one or more apprentices to learn his art. 
This apprenticeship was probably all the teaching 
received by the native practitioners of the seven- 
teenth century and the early eighteenth. It was 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



79 



complained, in 1647, that medical students in 
Massachusetts were " forced to fall to practice be- 
fore ever they saw an Anatomy made." The doc- 
tors of America could hardly have ranked with 
the most rustic chirurgeons in England. As the 
first generation of the American born came on the 
stage, ignorant quacks and fanatics grew as rank 
as the English weeds that flourished in the forest 
mold of a new continent. " We ought by all 
means," says a Pennsylvania writer of 1684, " to 
discountenance all Babylonical Letter-learned phy- 
sitians both for the Soul and Body." The medi- 
cine of the age was bad enough at its best ; worse 
than the Greek medicine whose traditions it 
revered and sometimes followed. The first in- 
fluence of the chemical school had been mainly 
bad ; it was only later that good results came from 
it. But the seventeenth century was none the less 
a century of advance ; in that age modern scien- 
tific medicine was born. Harvey's discovery of 
the circulation of the blood is the starting point, 
not only of modern medicine, but of experimental 
science as well. His investigations on the subject 
of generation gave a philosophical basis to com- 
parative anatomy, and thus broadened the field of 
human thought. In that century the skill of 
physicians first learned to cope with malarial dis- 
ease as a result of the introduction of cinchona, 
the most important of all modern remedies. But 
the intellectual progress of the time was a narrow 
current perceptible in the mid-channel of a wide 



Chap. II. 



The same, 
31- 



8o 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



and sluggish river whose shore reaches were stag- 
nant marshes and never-changing pools. 

Elucidations. 

There is a pleasant sentence touching this reverence for the 
traditional in Harvey's lectures, in which he alludes to the neces- 
sity for using the utmost precaution, because he is dealing with 
an error two thousand years old. " Hinc error 2,000 annorum 
pridem habitus quare egi obsequatis tabulis quia tarn antiqua : a 
tantis viris culta." Prelectiones, 78. 

But first they showed their high descent, 
Each eldest daughter to each element, 
Choler was owned by Fire and Blood by Air ; 
Earth knew her black swarth child, Water her fair. 

— Anne Bradstreet's Poems, 36. 

There were other curious notions about the humors. For exam- 
ple, a physician, writing on Tunbridge water in 1670, speaks of 
phlegm as "the private excrement of the brain at the mouth and 
nose." The opinion was no doubt generally held on the author- 
ity of Galen's Medical Definitions, in which the mucus from the 
nostrils is called " an excrement and sediment of the brain." 
Par^ says phlegm is blood half concocted and is fit to nourish the 
brain. English edition, p. 9. 

This " numeral fetichism " may be plainly traced to Galen, 
and it is evident also in the theory of the " critical days " in dis- 
ease which Hippocrates announced and which has been accepted 
in some form down almost to this day. See, for example. Apho- 
risms of Hippocrates, section ii, 24; iv, 59, 61, 64; and Adams's 
references to Galen on these in his edition. Sir Conrad Spren- 
gell's comment on the former of these, in his English trans- 
lation of the Aphorisms in 1735, shows the vitality of the notion 
at a late date. Conrad Sprengell reduces the days to periods, and 
he hesitates to accept the dictum of Hippocrates, that fevers are 
apt to return unless they leave the patient on odd days. Com- 
pare the short work that Kurt Sprengel, at a later day, makes of 
this very aphorism in his Apologie des Hippocrates, 1788. The 
ridicule of Moli^re has not missed a preciosity so delightful as 
this reverence for number. In the Malade Imaginaire the physi- 
cian is asked how many grains of salt should be put into an &gg. 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



"Six, eight, ten," is the reply, "in even numbers, as the medi- 
cines are to be given in odd numbers." Act ii, sc. ix. Com- 
pare also what Philo Judaeus says in eulogy of the number 
seven and its parts : Creation of the World, chap, xxx, and in 
chap. XXXV, his citation of an elegy by Solon the lawgiver, divid- 
ing life into ten periods of seven years. In the following chapter 
the division of human life by Hippocrates into seven periods is 
mentioned. This passion for numeration, thousands of years old, 
emigrated to America. Anne Bradstreet sings of The Four 
Humors in the Constitution of Man, The Four Ages of Man, 
The Four Seasons of the Year, and The Four Monarchies. The 
number four ran in the family ; her father, Governor Dudley, wrote 
of The Four Parts of the World. 

When the words of the text were written I did not know that 
Maurice Raynaud had remarked the same thing. " II est digne 
de remarque que la medecine humorale est restee celle des gens 
du peuple, dont la langage est si souvent ce qu'etait deux cents 
ans auparavant, celui de la science." Les Medecins au Temps de 
Moliere, i8o, note. In 1580 Juan Huarte, a Spanish physician, 
published Examen de Ingenios para las Sciencias, a work of great 
popularity which was rendered into many tongues. The English 
version appeared in 1616 under the title A Triall of Wits. 
Huarte tried to do what modern phrenology has attempted — to 
indicate the aptitude of men for different occupations. In chaps. 
V and vi he explains that all the difference in the character of 
men's minds is traceable to heat, dryness, and humidity. Dry- 
ness is favorable to understanding, heat to imagination, while 
moisture is essential to memory, which is therefore strongest in 
the morning. 

In that strange series of notes which we know as Bacon's 
Natural History, the following remedies are mentioned as familiar 
cathartics and diuretics of that time : colquintidae, agaric, black 
hellebore, scammony, antimony, mechoacan, rhubarb, senna, 
wormwood, myrobalanes, peach-tree bark, medicines of mercury, 
salt, oxymel, and pepper. Except mechoacan, peach-tree bark, 
and perhaps wormwood, all these remedies were known to the 
Arabians, and all the rest except senna, myrobalanes, and oxymel 
were, I believe, included in the ancient Greek materia medica. 
Compare Adams's Paulus ^gineta, vol. '\\\, passhn. Clysters and 
suppositories are mentioned by Bacon. It would seem that pur- 
gatives and their opposites were very important elements of Eng- 



Chap. ii. 



Note 4, 
page 51. 



Note 5, 
page 52. 



82 



The Transit of Civilization. 



lish medicine in the seventeenth century. Bacon repeats the jest 
of a famous Jewish physician, who said that English medical 
men were " like bishops that have the power of binding and loos- 
ing, but no more." Advancement of Learning, book ii. The use 
of cathartics to void humors that might send up vapors to the 
brain, recalls Vaughan's advice that one should sleep on the right 
side with the mouth open, and with a hole in the nightcap at the 
top. Fifteen Directions for Health, p. 13, 1602, Early English 
Text Society. 

Barrough's The Method of Phisicke directs in certain cases 
to draw blood out of the middle vein of the forehead, and in an- 
other case " you must cut the liuer veine on the arme." Third edi- 
tion, 1 60 1, pp. 45 and 46. I have also a copy of the seventh edi- 
tion of this popular manual dated 1634. Its general use in 
America was probably matched by its authority in England. 
There is a round denunciation of the practice of venesection by 
an anti-Galenist in Thomson on the Plague, 1666, pp. 50 and 51. 
Venesection was not nearly so common in England as in France. 
In the Historical MSS. Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, 
part V, p. 7, is a letter from Prince Rupert : " I am in noe small 
paine for our cosin since I heare she hath gott the small poxe. 
Pray God shee falle not into the Frenchifyed physician's hands, 
soe lett blode and dye." 

That the doctrine of signatures is more ancient than Para- 
celsus I have no doubt. The treatise De Dynamdiis, usually 
enumerated among the works of Galen, and sometimes ascribed 
to Gariopontus, of the famous medical school of Salerno (a pro- 
fessed compiler from Galen), deduces the therapeutic virtue of 
substances from color, form, or other characteristics. Qiuvres 
de Ambroise Pare, Introduction par Malgaigne, xxi. Compare 
also Henderson's School of Salernum, ii. But the editor of Syd- 
enham Society's edition of Paulus ^gineta has in part antici- 
pated this remark, for he says that he has " detected a few traces 
of the singular doctrine of signatures, so-called, in the works of 
ancient authorities," iii, 16. Major J. W. Powell, Director of the 
Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, tells me that 
the doctrine of curing by likes is a part of the medical theory of 
every tribe of American Indians, as it is very curiously of Chinese 
medicine. The conclusion is not a violent one that it is an ele- 
ment of primitive medicine tfenerally. It was elaborated into an 
element of philosophy in the later middle ages. Basilius Valen- 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



83 



tinus, whose Triumph Wagen Antimonii, written about 1500 
A. D., appears to have furnished Paracelsus with many germs of 
theory, pretends that a spider being poisonous can not get away 
if surrounded by a circle of unicorn's horn which was an ideal 
antidote to poison. But if any poisonous substance were added 
to the circle, the spell was broken and the spider escaped. Bread, 
on the other hand, was strongly attracted by unicorn's horn, both 
being free from poison, pp. 66 and 67, original edition, 1624. His 
general principle is stated mystically — " Simile simili gaudet." 
Paracelsus probably derives from this his dictum " of likes with 
likes, not contraries against contraries " (" Ex qua recepta sibi 
proponuntur siniilium cum similibus non contrariorum ad contra- 
ria "), and he adds, " Salt therefore wishes to have its Salt, Mer- 
cury its Mercury, and Sulphur its Sulphur " — salt, mercury, and 
sulphur being the three principal elements in mystic philosophy. 
Paracelsus, De Cutis Apertionibus, chap, vii, p. 62. Compare 
Otto Tachenius, His Clavis, p. 2, and see the doctrine of the sym- 
pathy of similars stated with a ludicrous mimicry of logic by a 
learned Galenist, Maranta, in his De Theriaca, liber i, caput Hi 
(1576). Adams, in his edition of the works of Hippocrates, i, 75 
ff., on the treatise anciently ascribed to Hippocrates and belonging 
to his period, On the Places in Man, says : " And he further 
makes the important remark that, although the general rule of 
treatment be ' contraria contrariis curantur,' the opposite rule 
also holds good in some cases, namely, ' Similia similibus cu- 
rantur.' " Basilius Valentinus, p. 68, recognizes both methods as 
though this passage were before him, and Paracelsus appears to 
be denying the first half of it in the extract given above. It is 
not possible to separate this doctrine ot curing by likes from the 
doctrine of signatures with which it was entangled. One of the 
best statements of this is to be found in the Magia Natural o 
Ciencia de Filosofia Secreta, a very intelligent work by Castrillo, 
a Spanish Jesuit, which bears date 1649. He says that many 
" modern philosophers " have pretended to find in external forms 
indications of the occult qualities of things. Plants that show 
any resemblance to the human head are good for cephalic troubles, 
as are animals whose heads are remarkable in shape, such as the 
elephant, the beaver, and others. Animals with eyes notable in 
any way are remedies for the ills of that organ, and he instances 
among others the turtle that in dying was believed to shut one 
eye and open the other, and mentions a stone that showed a 
pupil within a circle which rendered the vision acute if held in 



Chap. II. 



84 



The Transit of Civilization. 



the hand. The whole passage is interesting. Folios i6 and 17. 
The cure by similitudes is found in the treatment by amulets, 
and in that form is probably older than in medicine. There 
seems to be a trace of this mode of thinking in the ancient legend 
of Telephus, which has served so many poets, including Dante 
and Chaucer, and which gave anciently the name " telephean " 
to incurable ulcers. Wounded by Achilles, Telephus could be 
healed only by rust from the spear that inflicted the injury. A 
suggestion ot the same feeling among the Semitic nations is per- 
haps to be found in the brazen serpent of Moses, and in the 
offering of the Philistines, i Samuel, vi. 

From the English version of Jacob Behmen's De Signatura 
Rerum I quote the following : " Every root as it is in the Earth 
may be known by the signature for what it is good and profitable, 
. . . and it is discerned in the leaves and stalk which Planet is 
Lord in the Property, much more in the Flower : for of what taste 
the Herb and Root is, even such an Hunger is in it, and such a 
cure lies therein, for it has such a Salt." Compare the term sul- 
phur applied to rosin: " welchs des Baums Sulphur ist." Tri- 
umph Wagen, 230. There was a passion for the mystical and 
esoteric in science at the end of the middle ages. " Medicine," 
says Paracelsus, " is not otherwise a science than this that the 
will of God may be secret and secret may be the will of God." 
De Naturalibus Rebus, chap. v. Among the manuscripts in my 
collection is a very clever alchemical Poeme Sur I'elixir Royal in 
a handwriting of the late seventeenth century. In this. Nature, 
exhorting the poet to speak of the forces by which Heaven has 
extracted light from metals, enjoins him to speak esoterically 
" like a philosopher " : 

Paries, m-a-t-elle dit, de ces premiers agens 
Dont la del des metaux a puise la lumiere, 
Paries en Philosophe, afin que ma matiere 
Ne se laisse trouver qu'au plus intelligens. 

Bacon recommended the entrails and skin of a wolf for colic. 
A case recently occurred in the suburbs of New York city in which 
a mother administered boiled mice to cure a child of nervous 
timidity — no doubt a survival of some old English prescription 
based on " curing by the assimulate." Salmon, in his English 
Physician, 1693, p. 309, says, "The Flesh and the Liver of a 
Mad Dog drjed and beaten into Pouder are said to cure the bit- 
ing of a Mad Dog." He prescribes the spleen of an ox for dis- 



Concernino^ Medical Notions. 



85 



eases of that organ, and the lungs of a fox for pulmonaiy diseases. 
The list of such remedies might be multiplied. In popular medi- 
cine yellow dock is still used for jaundice. In 1708 Lady Otway 
gives two recipes for curing jaundice made up mostly of yellow 
substances. In the one she put lemon, turmeric, and saffron ; 
the other consisted of " 20 head-lice mixed with nutmeg and 
sugar and powder of turmerick." Royal Historical MSS. Com- 
mission, Tenth Report, Appendix, part iv, 352. 

Stafford appears to claim this as his own nostrum, but the 
process is given in Paracelsus, who no doubt found it in Basil 
Valentine, who differs from Stafford in the number of toads. One 
live poisonous toad — ein lebendige gifftige Krote — is his prescrip- 
tion. The toad was dried in the sun and burned in a closed 
kettle, after which it was pulverized. He explains that calcina- 
tion brought out the inner power or poison of the toad, which 
being applied, " like its like," drew out. Basil calls it a magnetic 
cure. Triumph Wagen, edition 1624, 71. See the allusions to 
this preparation in Emanuel Konig, Regnum Animale, 1683, 139, 
where various authorities are cited, and where a mode of prepar- 
ing the toad for an amulet — nobilissimum amuletum — is given, 
following Paracelsus and the Basilica Chymica. On the medical 
uses to which the toad was applied in England compare History 
of Animals and Minerals, by Robert Lovell, Oxford, 1661, and 
Salmon's English Physician, 1693. As an antidote to its own 
poison the red toad was used anciently. See the authorities cited 
in Adams's Paulus .^Egineta, ii, 207. 

It must have been unfortunate to have a prescription of such 
value in controversy, but the authorities are not agreed as to its 
ingredients. Moss from the skull of a dead man, cerz derelicta, 
was, however, a permanent element. Bacon gives some account 
of one prescription in his Natural History, section 998. But John 
Baptist Porta has the prescription given by Paracelsus to the Em- 
peror Maximilian, and received through a courtier by Porta. I 
give it in English : Two ounces of skull moss, as above ; of hu- 
man flesh, the same ; of mummy (a liquor reported to be distilled 
from dead bodies) and of human blood, each half an ounce ; of 
linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole, each one ounce — 
pound all together in mortar. Porta's Magia Naturalis, liber viii, 
caput xii. According to Porta, the weapon was left lying in the 
ointment. In the text I have followed a different prescription 
given in Bacon's Natural History. In the selection of ingredients 



Chap. II. 



Note 10, 
page 58. 



Note II, 
page 59. 



86 



77^1? Transit of Civilization. 



for this preparation the mystical doctrine of curing by simihtude 
is manifest. 

" The operation of this ointment," says the author of a famous 
pharmacopoeia, in 1641, "is by the identity or sameness of the 
Balsamick spirit, which is the same in a Man and his Blood ; for 
there is no difference but this, in a Man the Spirit actually lives, 
but in the Blood it is coagulated." Shroder, quoted by Salmon, 
English Physician, vii, 64. See also Sir Kenelm Digby's Sympa- 
thetic Powder generally, and a theory of the action of this pow- 
der, or " Zaphyrian Salt," in Howell's Familiar Letters. Jacob's 
edition, 645. An account of the cure of Howell by this remedy 
is in supplement ii, 673, 674, and in Digby's A Late Discourse 
touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, 6-1 1. 
The sympathetic powder was used for all hsemorrhages and even 
for other diseases, according to Sprengel. Compare Sir K. Digby 
on the cure of swelled feet in oxen, Discourse on Sympathetic 
Powder, 129-132. In the time of their greatest vogue these 
cures were probably never sanctioned by the strict Galenists. 
The subject was discussed before the Royal Society in its infancy 
in a paper intituled Relations of Sympathetic Cures and Trials. 
Sprat, 199. 

Ambroise Pare, the famous surgeon, had the wholesome 
scientific skepticism which was wanting in Lord Bacon and most 
other philosophers of the time. He denounced the weapon oint- 
ment as imposture. " Neither if any should let me see the truth 
of such juggling by the events themselves and my own eyes, 
would I therefore believe that it were done naturally and by 
reason, but rather by charms and Magick." Park's works, old 
EngHsh version, 39. Pard also refused mummy, not knowing 
what it was made of. Compare the debate in the Glasgow Syn- 
od over the curative power of the famous Lee penny. Mitchell's 
Past in the Present, 1 59. 

Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the French court in 1 596 
was attended in his illness by Lorrayne, a physician of the famous 
faculty of Montpellier, and another. " They gave him Confectio 
Alcarmas compounded of musk, amber, gold, pearl, and uni- 
corn's horn," ingredients whose virtues seem to have been de- 
duced from their rarity and costliness. The confectio alkermes, 
an Arabic remedy, varied in its ingredients. The amber was 
ambergris. See the formula in the Amsterdam Pharmacopoeia of 
1636, p. 61, and that in the London Dispensatory as quoted and 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



87 



discussed in Culpepper's Physitian's Library, 1675. The Arabic 
form of the confection appears to have been less complicated. In 
the well-known pharmaceutical work of Mesue the younger — 
John son of Mesue, son of Mech, son of Hely, son of Abdella, King 
of Damascus — the ingredients in this " confectione alkermes " are 
fewer, and there are no pearls or ambergris. The costly ele- 
ments are "good gold," "good musk," and lapis lazuli. My 
copy of this work is called Mesue Vulgare, perhaps because it is 
in Italian. It bears date Venice, 1493, and must have been one 
of the earliest of printed medical works. See K. Sprengel, vol. 
ii, 361-364, on Mesue the younger. On the tendency to expen- 
sive remedies, compare Howell's Familiar Letters, 45. " More 
operativ then Bezar, of more virtue then Potable Gold or the 
Elixir of Amber." In Moliere's Medecin Malgr6 Lui, acte iii, 
scene 2, Sganarelle speaks of a medical preparation : " Oui, c'est 
un fromage prepare, ou il entre de I'or, du corail, et des perles, 
et quantite des autres choses precieuses." An English confec- 
tion described by Bassompierre may have been the confectio 
alkermes spoken of above: "A pie of ambergrease magesterial, 
of pearl, musk," etc. Bassompierre's Embassy, 36. The bezoar- 
dick powder magisterial of the London Dispensatory contained 
sapphire, ruby, jacinth, emerald, pearls, unicorn's horn, Oriental 
and American bezoar, musk, ambergris, bone of a stag's heart, 
kermes, and sixteen other ingredients. " I am afraid to look 
upon it," says Culpepper. " 'Tis a great cordial to revive the 
Body, but it will bring the purse into a consumption." 

The application of a fowl freshly cut open, to cure erysipelas 
and other diseases, has been practiced in the valley of the Ohio 
and probably elsewhere within memory. Lorrayne, of the famous 
faculty of Montpellier, in his treatment of the English ambassador 
referred to above, made use of " pigeons applied to his side, and 
all other means that art could devise sufficient to expel the strong- 
est poison and he be not bewicht withal." MSS. at Hatfield 
House, vi, 112, Manuscripts Commission. " I never heard of 
but one person bitten in Pennsylvania and New Jersey with the 
Rattlesnake," says Budd, " and he was helpt of it by two chickens 
slit assunder and apply'd to the place, which drew out the Poy- 
son.'' Govvan's edition, p. 71. 

Gold is said by the alchemist to have its origin in the sun. It 
is called " the under sun," and " an earthly sun endowed by God 
with an incredible potency, for in it are included all vegetable, 
animal, and mineral virtues." Potable gold is the "tincture of 



Chap. II. 



Note 15, 
page 61. 



The Transit of Civilization. 



the sun," and the enthusiastic Glauber talks of " partaking of the 
fruit of the Sun tree." Compare Phaedro and Glauber passim. 
A large volume would not be sufficient to recount all the virtues 
of this powerful remedy, in Glauber's opinion. Compare Evelyn's 
Diary, i, 271. 

The curious and scientific reader may follow if he can the pro- 
cess for making potable gold, the " True tincture of the Sun," in 
the various works of Glauber, or in De Via Universal! he may 
learn to get both potable gold and the philosopher's stone by 
" the dry process " or by " the wet process." He may get direc- 
tions for making the tincture in Glauber's De Auri Tinctura sive 
Auro Potabili, a German work with a Latin title, dated 1652. Or 
he may read the Panaceas Hermeticas seu Medicinae Universalis 
of Johann Gerhard, 1640; but he will .find the "most secret mode 
of compounding the Universal Medicine" in the Arcamun Lullia- 
num. There is a rare tractate, Vom Stein der Weisen, written in 
the middle of the sixteenth century, by Phaedro von Rodach. 
These and others are before me, but, after some wearying of the 
mind with esoteric phrases in a compound of old German and 
Latin, I prefer to leave the question of the actual constitution of 
the most potent universal remedy to special investigators. Fons- 
sagrives, in the Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medi- 
cales, under the word "Or," says that a preparation of mercury 
and chloride of gold constituted the so-called potable gold of the 
seventeenth century — I do not know on what authority. I am in 
some doubt whether, after all the complicated hugger-mugger, 
the alchemists got any gold in their final decoctions. According 
to Phaedro, it was not so much gold they sought as the subtile 
spirit of gold that freed men and metals from impurities. Glau- 
ber, in his De Auri Tinctura, 1652, took pains to explain how 
the true could be known from the false and sophisticated pota- 
ble gold, some of which was nothing but colored water, p. 24. 
Angelus Sala, though of the Paracelsian school, ridiculed the no- 
tion of drinkable gold, and declared that fulminating gold (knall- 
gold) was the only preparation of that metal that had ever been 
made. Sprengel, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iv, 557. It has 
been conjectured that some of the so-called potable gold offered 
for sale was merely a preparation of mercur)'. The two metals 
were allied, in the fancy of the time. In the Ehralter Ritterkrieg 
Gold calls Mercury " Mein Bruder Mercurio," and yet says that 
mercury was the female and gold the male. Salmon's English 
Physician, p. 10, has two recipes for making tincture of gold, one 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



89 



with, the other without mercury. More than one writer intimates 
that there is as much gold left after the liquid essence is drawn 
off. " Aurum decoctione non atteritur," says Lemnius. But the 
mere looI<ing at gold coins or at rings, especially if adorned with 
"stones and lovely gems," recreated the eyes and heart, and a 
man might be brought to himself when in a collapse by applying 
gold and saffron to the region of the heart with the third finger of 
the left hand. Lemnius, Occvltis Naturae Miraculis, 309, 310. 

An English manuscript in my possession in the handwriting 
of the seventeenth century gives many directions for alchemical 
processes to attain the " quintessence " so much sought. Some 
of these had to be conducted in the earth. Under the title The 
Essence of wine whereby to Dissolue Gold this occurs : " To the 
Essence of wine twice circulated (as is elsewhere taught), add 
Gold & Sett it in digestion in Sand wth a Lamp For 3 months & 
yu shall finde the Gold dissolued but not irreducibly, never the 
lesse a quarter of a Spoonfull given at a time to a dying man, tho 
he be insensible, it will restore him half an hour to perfect sence, 
as ever he was in all his life." 

The library of Winthrop the younger consisted of more than a 
thousand volumes. The fraction of it now in the Society Library 
in New York is less than half. Among these is Hercules Chymi- 
cus sive Aurum Potabile, 1641, and Traicte de la Vraye Unique 
Grand et Universelle Medecine des Anciens, dite des Recens, Or 
Potabile, 1633. There was also Glauber's Latin Treatise of 1658 
on Potable Gold. These were new books. The revival of inter- 
est in potable gold in the seventeenth century awakened opposi- 
tion. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, says: "Some take 
it upon them to cure all maladies by one medicine severally ap- 
plyed, as that Panacea, Aurum potabile, so much controverted in 
these days." In 1403 an English statute had been passed mak- 
ing it felony to "use any craft of multiplication " to increase the 
quantity of gold and silver. Statutes at Large, ii, 448. Robert 
Boyle, in the seventeenth century, in spite of his having written 
The Sceptical Chemist, thought he had discovered the forgotten 
secret of the fifteenth century, but he did not print his discovery. 
Sir Isaac Newton wrote to the Royal Society in praise of Boyle's 
reticence, fearing that the full disclosure of what the hermetics 
knew was " not to be communicated without immense damage 
to the world." In 1689, however, Bnyle secured the repeal of 
the statute forbidding the making of gold. Thus did the dark 



Chap. II. 



Note 17, 
page 61. 



Note 18, 
page 62. 



90 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



shadow of mediceval credulity still fall upon the most enlightened 
minds. Compare Chalmer's Dictionary of Biography, vi, 348, 349. 

The multitudinousness of ancient compounds was perhaps a 
trait derived from primitive medicine. The Iroquois had a sort 
of theriac, a cure for all bodily injuries, made from the dried and 
pulverized skin of every known bird, beast, and fish. Erminnie 
A. Smith, in Powell's Second Bureau of Ethnology Report, 73. 

" In that country [Java] but very seldome there grows a Stone 
in the Stomach of a Porkapine, called Pedro Porco : of whose 
virtue there are large discriptions : and the Hollanders are now so 
fond that I have seen 400 dollars of ■§■ given for one no bigger 
than a Pidgeon's Egg. There is sophistication as well in that as 
in the Bezoar, Musk, &c., and every day new falsehood." Sir P. 
Vernatti, in Sprat's Royal Society, 171. There was exhibited in 
the University of Leyden " the home of a goat in whosse ven- 
trikle the bezar stone is found." Marmaduke Rawdon, Camden 
Society, 105. Compare the accounts in Monardes and Acosta 
and the discussion in Castrillo's Magia Natural, last chapter. 
Castrillo calls the bezoar " Regna de los Venenos," and says 
that it cured pestiferous fevers and other diseases caused by 
melancholy humors. Joannes Juvenis, in his essay De Medica- 
mentis Bezoardicis, published in Antwerp in the latter part of the 
sixteenth century, treats the bezoar very mystically. A disease 
of an occult and divine origin — divinus et Secretus morbus — like 
the plague, exacts a medicine of a heavenly and concealed fac- 
ulty, and, as he said, with a blind and hidden potency. The plague, 
he says, " is a mysterious disease of the heart caught by inhala- 
tion from poison dispersed in the air by a malign conjunction of 
the planets." It requires a bezoardic remedy. Under this head 
he includes alexipharmical mixtures and remedies whose sup- 
posed virtues have no rational basis, as well as amulets. He 
describes an amulet of gold, silver, and arsenic made into the 
shape of a heart and worn next that organ by Pope Adrian, and 
he recommends the wearing of six precious stones and some bril- 
liant pearls in finger rings or about the neck. They are to be 
frequently looked on, for in them resides " the hidden bezoar " 
against all poisons and the plague. There is here the sense of 
alexipharmical in the word bezoar. Compare the citations of 
Adams in Paulus .^gineta, iii, 247. Beguin's El^mens de Chy- 
mie, edited by Lucas de Roy, 1632, describes seven kinds of 
" bezoart " — to wit, mineral, solar, lunar, martial, jovial, metallic, 



Co7icerning Medical Notions. 



91 



and solar of Harthmannus. None of these have anything to 
do with the bezoar stone. Pare says that it is called by the 
Arabians bedezabar. But he quotes Garcias ab Horto as say- 
ing that the goat is called pazain, wherefore the stone should 
be called pazar. Fare's (Parey's) works in English, book xxi, 
chap, xxxvi. 

The colonists w^ere cut off by distance from that most potent 
remedy for king's evil, the roj'al touch, by which thousands of 
English people were healed, and the administration of which the 
Church of England sanctioned by a form of prayer. See in Spar- 
row's Collection, 1671. In 1684 six or seven people were literally 
crushed to death in the mad eagerness of the crowd to secure 
the blessing of the royal touch. Evelyn's Diary, 571. It is re- 
marked by Aubrey with his wonted innocency that " whether 
our kings were of the house of York or Lancaster " the touch 
" did the cure (i. e.) for the most part." Worse than all, in 
the time of Monmouth's rebellion, the illegitimate touch of the 
pretender cured some of his believing partisans. Castrillo, the 
Spanish Jesuit, declared in 1649 that the intercessions of Joseph 
of Arimathea, the first missionary to England, had secured to its 
monarchs " el cura de la gota." The Spanish kings, on the other 
hand, had the gift of exorcism. " Los reges de Espafia tienen 
gracia de ahuyentor demonios por auer sus antecessores professado 
la propagacion de la Fe," etc. Magia Natural, folio 81. The 
miraculous touch of the English kings was believed to date from 
the Confessor. The touch of a seventh son — " a seventh son 
and no daughter between, and in pure wedlock " — was almost as 
good as the king's perhaps. Aubrey's Miscellanies, fourth edi- 
tion, 124, 125. Seventh sons were to be reached in America 
sometimes. Faith in the virtue of their touch is not yet quite ex- 
tinct in America or in England. Compare Diary of Walter 
Yonge, 13, note. In 1688 a man afflicted with ulcers petitioned 
the Governor of Massachusetts to give him a brief to solicit money 
in Massachusetts to defray the expense of a trip to England to 
crave the royal touch. Green's Medicine in Massachusetts, 48. 

I am indebted to Miss S. F. Price, the well-known botanist of 
Bowling Green, Ky., for technical information regarding dittany. 
The authorities on dittany are too numerous for citation. Virgil 
perpetuated the memory of the wild goats of Candia, and old 
medical books continued to refer to them. See Fare's works in 
English, 1600, p. 41. 



Chap. II. 



Note 21, 
page 66. 



Note 22, 
page 68. 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



As early as 1568 Andre Thevet's New found World or Ant- 
arctike appeared in an English version. Although quite vague, 
and on many accounts untrustworthy, it probably awakened curi- 
osity regarding the medicinal value of American plants. The far 
more significant and much-esteemed work of Monardes, a Span- 
ish physician, was probably read in England on its first appear- 
ance in Spanish in 1565. Fourteen years later, in 1577, the first 
English edition was issued, and its influence can be traced in the 
account which Hariot gave of Virginia in De Bry. Through 
Monardes the English public first became familiar with the ex- 
traordinary medicinal virtues attributed to tobacco, and in his 
pages sarsaparilla and sassafras, strongholds of quackery to this 
day, were first made known to a public that soon became enam- 
ored of two plants which had the virtue of innocuousness. In 
the estimation of Monardes the " leaves, plants, herbs, roots, 
blossoms, gums, fruits, seeds, Hquors, and stones of great me- 
dicinal virtues " which had come from America were of as much 
greater value than all other wealth of the New World as " bodily 
health is worth more than temporal good." First Spanish edi- 
tion, 1565, p. 3. 

Books of reference and most writers on Virginia confound 
John Clayton, author of various papers in the Transactions 
of the Royal Society, with Clayton the botanist, whose observa- 
tions in the eighteenth century supplied the foundation for the 
Flora Virginica of Gronovius. A writer in the National Diction- 
ary of Biography, with bibliographical detail, ascribes all the writ- 
ings of John Clayton, the seventeenth century clergyman, to John 
Clayton the botanist in the eighteenth centur)', making the latter 
the precocious author of papers published five years before the 
date of his birth as given in the same work. John Clayton, the 
parson, was also the author of a posthumous paper in volume xli 
of the Transactions of the Royal Society. Neill calls him " the 
parson of Jamestown," but, so far as I know, without any au- 
thority. 

I am unable to identify the little creatures found on oak 
leaves which proved a remedy in some diseases when worn 
about the neck in taffetie bags by New England women. Josse- 
lyn's Two Voyages, 63. Increase Mather gives a popular cure 
for ague in New England, aimed at its periodicity. Five pieces of 
bread having letters written on them were given into the custody 
of the patient, who was to write in succession on one of these 



Concernm^ Medical Notions. 



93 



each day the word kalend (ant) for five days. Toothache was 
cured in Boston by giving a sealed piece of paper on which was 
written, " In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, preserve thy 
servant," etc. Illustrious Providences, 185. In Queen Eliza- 
beth's time there was a curious remedy, which is alluded to as 

follows : 

Gellia wore a velvet mastick-patch 
Upon her temples when no tooth did ach. 

— Hall's Satires, vi, i. 

A belief in the value of perfumes for sickness, and especially 
for the plague, prevailed in Elizabeth's reign. See BuUein's Dia- 
logue against the Fever Pestilence, passim, and the remark of 
Mulcaster on perfumes : " It is wonderful that is written and 
strange that we see, what is wrought thereby in nature of Phys- 
ick, lor the remedying of some desperate diseases." Positions, 
37. I have not chanced to note anything of the sort in the seven- 
teenth century writers, whose nostrums were far from sweet- 
smelling. 

The curious reader may consult on the use of animal sub- 
stances the regular pharmacopoeias of the time. See also such 
works as Emanuel Konig's Regnum Animale, and in particular 
his chapter De Insectorum in Medecina utilitatibus. Culpepper's 
Commentary on the London Dispensatory, 1675, contains lists of 
these animal substances in undisguised English. Cotton Mather 
said of Wait Winthrop, the third of the family to practice medicine 
on his neighbors, that he turned nearly all Nature to medicine : 

Et pene omnem Naturam fecit Medicam. 

Clayton, in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1687, 
xli, 149, describes the Indian method of curing wounds by suck- 
ing them and then using the mouth as a syringe to inject a biting 
decoction. Instead of cupping, the savages cauterized with lighted 
punk. 

The practice of surgeons was not held in high esteem in Eng- 
land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Halle, in 
the preface to Lanfranke's Chirurgerie, 1 565, says : " Whereas 
there is one Chirurgien that was apprentice to his arte, or one 
phisicien that hath trauayled in the true Studie and Exercise of 
Phisique, there are tenne that are presumptious Smearers, Smat- 
erers, or Abusers of the same, yea, Smythes, Cutlers, Carters, 
Coblers, Copers, Coriars of lether, Carpenters, and a great rable 
of women, which forsake their handle Craftes and for filthy lucre 



The Transit of Civilizatio?i. 



abuse Phisick and Chirurgerie." After lauding the medical pro- 
fession, Peacham says : " I here intend no common Chirurgians, 
Mountebanks, unlettered Empericks, and women-Doctors . . . 
whose practice is infamous, Mechanick, and base." Compleat 
Gentleman, ii. See in Malgaine's Introduction to Pare's works, 
pp. 124 and 138 ff., decrees and ordinances for the regulation of 
barber-surgeons in the middle ages, with an account of the 
struggle of the surgeons to abase the barbers. In England mat- 
ters had come to such a pass in the sixteenth century that Sir H. 
Gilbert, in his Queen Elizabeth's Achademy, says that " Chirur- 
gie is not now to be learned in any other place then in a Barbors 
Shoppe." To the practice of barbers, and surgeons little better, 
the colonists were usually shut up by circumstances. One early 
Virginia surgeon was a Dutch bond servant. A library consist- 
ing of The Surgeon's Mate or of Barrough's Method of Phisicke, 
rarely of several books, gave the suffering what comfort can be 
had from quackery that is self-reliant from mere ignorance.. '-->.v 
Crocus Metallorum, the favorite Virginia remedy, was an 
officinal preparation used in several formulae by Sydenham at 
that time. The editor of the works of Sydenham (Sydenham 
Opera Omnia, 1844) makes it " Antimonii Sesquioxyd cum Anti- 
mon. Sequisulphur." It was emetic. See Sydenham's Epistle I, 
works in English, ii, 19. It was prepared according to the Lon- 
don Dispensatory by calcining together equal parts of antimony 
and saltpeter. On the use of sulphuret of antimony by the Jews, 
Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, see an interesting note in Adams's 
Paulus yEgineta, iii, 356. The curious reader may also consult 
Basil Valentine, p. 37, who makes antimony " one of the seven 
wonders of the world." The tract Von den Particular Vnd Vni- 
versal-Tincturen, appended to the Triumph Wagen, Tholden's 
issue, 1624, contains a section " De Crocis Metallorum, et eorum 
Salibus," written in alchemical style. Venice treacle was the 
world-famed theriac, which, according to the English formula, 
contained about sixty-five ingredients, and was given as a uni- 
versal antidote. Gascoin's powder was the compound powder 
of calcined crab's claws, so called. I do not know what it was, 
but not literal crab's claws. Snakeroot is the only American 
remedy in the list, and this had been accepted in Europe. Evi- 
dently the Virginia doctors were old-fashioned, and, according to 
their slender knowledge, Galenist. Medicines of the other school 
and simples were perhaps used in domestic and irregular prac- 
tice. 



^'r*^;?^ 



Concerning Medical Notions. 



95 



Forsyth's Antiquary's Portfolio, i, 36, has the broad statement 
that in the Heptarchy and to the time of Richard II physic was 
in the hands of old women and the clergy. It was taught in the 
nunneries to girls before the Reformation as a womanly accom- 
plishment, ibid., 238. The sense of its appropriateness to women, 
and the habit of prescription by accomplished women, survived 
in the seventeenth century and later. Clayton said of the In- 
dians in 1687, " Every one according to his skill is a doctor (as 
some women are in England)." Transactions of the Royal So- 
ciety, xli, 143. Tiraboschi, in his Storia della Litteratura Italiana, 
iii, lib. iv, sect, ii, cites from Odericus Vitalis a passage implying 
that the most skillful physician in the world-famous school of 
Salerno in 1059 was a woman. Of Rodolfo he says : " Nella 
medecina ancora egli era cosi versato, che in Salerno . . . non si 
trove chi es uqualiasse fuor di una dotta matrona." This is sup- 
posed to refer to Trotula, some of whose writings have come 
down to our time. The wording of the decree of 1281 cited in 
Astruc's Histoire de la Faculte de Medecine de Montpellier, p. 
20, is considered by Malgaigne to imply the habitual practice of 
medicine by women in the middle ages. In this decree Jacques 
" defend . . . itoutes personnes tant aux Chretiens qu'aux Juifs," 
to practice without degrees. Compare Malgaigne's inference from 
this in his preface to CEuvres d'Ambroise Par6, but Malgaigne's 
reference to Astruc and his date are both slightly inaccurate. On 
the women professors of the school of Salerno, Henderson's 
pamphlet on that school and Ordronneaux's Code of Health of 
Salerno. As late as 1691 Cotton Mather, in " Ornaments for the 
Daughters of Zion," mentions " chirurgery " as an appropriate 
study for women. It is said that in colonial New Jersey women 
engrossed a considerable share of the medical art, such as it was. 
This is no doubt true of all the colonies. 



Chap. II. 

Note 31, 
page 78. 



CHAPTER THE THIRD. 

MOTHER ENGLISH, FOLK-SPEECH, FOLK-LORE, AND 
LITER A TURE. 



Chap. III. 

The lan- 
guage of 
the time. 



Note I. 



I. 

At the beginning of English emigration to 
America the language was the narrow speech of 
an island people not much given to foreign enter- 
prise. This stay-at-home tongue was very differ- 
ent from the comprehensive English spoken now 
in many climes and antipodal countries, and heard 
more world-widely than any other language since 
speech began. It is the implement of two most 
powerful, adventurous, and versatile peoples. Then 
it was held in contempt of scholars, who preferred 
to use imperial Latin, which made the learned men 
of Europe one nation and distinguished them from 
the vulgar. Long after the religious unity of the 
Western world had ceased, the Roman Empire dom- 
inated the language of philosophy and law and re- 
ligion. English was an insular speech, but it was 
not by any means the language of the whole island. 
To the Scottish Highlanders and to the Welshmen 
it was a foreign tongue ; Cornishmen had violently 
opposed the Reformation mainly because they 
would not endure to have their service read and 
their Bible printed in English, to them a jargon 

96 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literatnre. 



97 



more unintelligible than the Latin they had been 
wont to hear in church from childhood. Even in 
what may be called English England the language 
was everywhere cleft into dialects and subdialects. 
It was still a matter of discussion where standard 
English could be found. The rugged forms of the 
shires north of the Trent were accounted the purer 
English ; there the language had absorbed a smaller 
number of French and Latin words than it had in 
the south. On the other hand, the speech of Lon- 
don and its environs was preferred, because it was 
" more courtly and more current." This courtly 
speech, the language of poetry and the playhouse 
and the forerunner of our modern English, pre- 
vailed in the region that lay within about sixty 
miles of London "and not much above." There 
were gentlemen in all the shires that could "speak 
good Southerne," but most of the gentlemen and 
men of learning — the " learned clarkes," as they 
were called — habitually spoke the dialects of the 
common people of their counties. Even the " good 
Southerne " of the court was not yet fixed by rule, 
but was in a state of flux. This gave an advantage 
to the writer of first-rate power ; he might select 
from the varied and ever-varying storehouse of 
common speech, and even from homelier dialect 
sometimes, such vital words and vivid proverbial 
phrases as fitted his thought. He could bend the 
yet supple language to his purpose untrammeled 
by conventional restraint and without fear of the 
grammarian. The language has never been more 



Chap. III. 

Compare 

also Sy- 

monds's 

Diary, 

Camden 

Society. 



Note 2. 



Putten- 
ham's Arte 
of English 
Poesie, 
1589. 



Note 3. 



The Tra?tsit of Civilization. 



fresh and effective than it was in the hands of the 
masters of the Elizabethan time. But the great 
body of writers, being men of mediocrity, found in 
it no well-worn grooves through which common- 
place utterance might flow smoothly without ex- 
pert guidance. 

II. 

On the side of poetic and imaginative expres- 
sion English had been enriched before the sailing 
of the first Virginia emigrants, and it was further 
enriched in the years immediately following, chiefly 
through the drama and prose works in theology. 
But almost the only refining and enlarging influ- 
ence of that time of literary activity that reached 
the speech of the common people, to which class 
most of the emigrants belonged, was the authorized 
translation of the Bible, which was published in 
1611, and which by degrees took the place of the 
older and ruder versions. The language may have 
acquired something from the sea ventures of the 
time to Turkey and Russia and the Spanish main. 
" Secretaries Marchaunts and trauailours " were 
already introducing alien words, but England pos- 
sessed little foreign commerce and did not yet 
promise to take rank as a sea power. The sud- 
den demand upon this close-cabined island speech 
in the seventeenth century for means to represent 
the endless objects, actions, and experiences of the 
New World and of a widening commerce was one 
of the most efificient forces for developing modern 
Enoflish. 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



99 



III. 

A language carried into a new environment 
brings with it preconceived notions not in har- 
mony with the surroundings; the ideas that are 
imbedded in our ordinary speech seem to us a 
part of the original constitution of the universe, 
and the traditional notions associated with com- 
moh words serve to fortify local and national 
prejudice. In the wilderness of America English 
speech was a misfit ; an Indian chief, however 
squalid and beggarly, was forthwith translated into 
a king ; the stark-naked little squaw child Pocahon- 
tas, turning herself into a wheel in imitation of the 
boys with whom she played at Jamestown, bore in 
English the incongruous title of princess. We hear 
of an " Indian king " in New Jersey who was hired 
to carry a traveler's baggage ; and after encounter- 
ing many scrubby royalties, it is a relief to find in 
New England one chief who was only a duke. The 
early adoption into colonial speech of the discrim- 
inating Indian titles — werowance, sachem, saga- 
more, and cockerouse — and the application at last 
of the generic English word chief, helped to dissi- 
pate a swarm of erroneous notions. More specific 
terms were the result of fuller knowledge; the 
compound bark house in which an *' emperor," like 
Powhatan, dwelt as co-tenant with numerous fami- 
lies of his wife's totem, ceased to be a palace and 
became a wigwam. It was thus that English by 
degrees adjusted itself to a new environment. 



Chap. III. 



Misappre- 
hensions 
of English. 



L.ofC. 



lOO 



The Trafisit of Civilisation. 



IV. 

The settler in America, like Adam in the new- 
made world, was called upon to give names " to 
the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field." 
This was done in some cases most naturally by 
descriptive epithets, such as bluebird, mocking- 
bird, catbird, canvas-back duck, flying squirrel, 
black bear. But the newcomer was sure to think 
he recognized in the primitive woods the plants 
and birds and beasts known or half known to him 
in the Old World. American creatures thus got 
second-hand names from real or supposed resem- 
blances. The bison became a buffalo; the planti- 
grade raccoon does duty in some accounts as an ape 
or a monkey ; the puma, as the largest American 
cat, became a " lyon " in Virginia, a panther and a 
catamount in various places, while it remained a 
" tyger " in South Carolina for more than a hun- 
dred years. The ear of the homesick emigrant 
caught the melody of bird songs that reminded 
him of the delicious vespers of the nightingale 
which he was nevermore to hear. Various birds 
were thus brevetted with the name of the Euro- 
pean songster. In Virginia this substitute nightin- 
gale was the voluble redbird, according to Clay- 
ton, though in earlier lists both redbird and night- 
ingale appear. In New England there were also 
so-called nightingales " painted with orient colors — 
black, white, blew, yellow, green, and scarlet," ac- 
cording to Josselyn's multitudinous description. 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



lOI 



The Delaware region had its nightingale. The 
brown-throated song sparrow is unhesitatingly iden- 
tified with the nightingale ot Europe by French 
Canadians to this day. With one accord English 
settlers north and south endowed a migratory red- 
breasted thrush with the name and all the tradi- 
tional sentiment that belonged to the smaller and 
more domestic "robin redbreast" of England. 
The mistake did not go unsuspected, for in some 
northern regions there is an attempt to rectify it 
by calling the Baltimore bird " the old-England 
robin," a name that misses the mark again, but that 
from its form must have been set agoing in the ear- 
liest colonial time. 

V. 

In popular thought at the period of American 
settlement every place beyond the countries of Eu- 
rope was a region of outer darkness dominated by 
devils who were worshiped as deities. The typical 
infidel was the Turk, the ancient foe of Christen- 
dom ; an idol was therefore called a mawmet, that 
is to say, a Mahomet, from a notion that the Ara- 
bian prophet was a false god. It may have been 
from this general confounding of all the world that 
lay without Christendom that some plants and ani- 
mals from the New World easily got the name of 
Turkey or Turkish attached to them. The fowl 
we call by that name was in French a eoq d Inde 
or Indian cock, whence the modern French dinde 
and dindon. The confusion between the East and 



Chap. III. 

nius, New 
Sweden, 
p. 41. 



The 
turkey. 



I02 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



West Indies led no doubt to the curious German 
name " Calcutta hen," though even in German 
" Indian cocks and hens" appear. In England the 
turkey was sometimes called the Indish peacock 
or the "peacock of Inde" in the sixteenth century, 
so that the peacock pies on which judges and 
others were sometimes feasted at the time may 
have been concocted of turkeys. If the English 
name of turkey did not come from a general dis- 
position to trace all outlandish things to the home 
of the Eastern infidel, it perhaps was borrowed 
from the bustard, with which the turkey was sup- 
posed to be allied in the easy natural history of 
the time. 

VI. 

Indian corn, an American plant in origin, culti- 
vated throughout almost the whole western hemi- 
sphere, was early called Turkish corn by the Ital- 
ians. The name seems to have been transplanted 
from Italian into other Continental languages, and 
in English speech it was also sometimes Turkish 
wheat. Ralph Lane, Ralegh's commander in 
North Carolina, calls it " Gynneye wheat." From 
the time of Acosta there have been those who have 
sought with futile ingenuity to deduce an Oriental 
origin for maize, founding their argument mainly 
on the blunder in the Italian name. This prolific 
mistake may have sprung from a confusion of 
maize with buckwheat, which on account of its Asi- 
atic origin bore the name of Saracen corn. Maize, 



Mother English, Folk- Lore, mid Literature. 



103 



as another sort of coarse grain, was also called 
Saracen corn, but usually Turkish corn. Other 
nations were wont in the sixteenth century to take 
fashions of all sorts from Italy, and the name there 
given to maize became common. Even the kidney 
bean, which was one of the most valued contribu- 
tions of the American Indians to European food 
products, was called the Turkish bean, for no other 
reason perhaps than that it twined about the so- 
called Turkish corn. It was mistakenly identified 
with the " Turkish garavance," the chick pea. The 
word maize did not come into use in the English 
colonies ; a letter of the Virginia Company calls 
the plant " maes " and " mace " ; but maize remains 
to-day only a book word in America. In 165 1 a 
Virginia writer calls the plant Indian wheat, and 
later it appears as Virginia wheat. It graduall}^ 
came to be called in all the colonies Indian corn, 
to distinguish it from other cereals. The natural 
abridgment of the word in popular use has made 
the generic word corn stand for a particular kind 
of corn unknown in England. In New England, 
where the phrase English corn long survived, the 
other end of the word was dropped, and " Indian " 
very early came to stand for maize even after it 
had been ground and cooked. Grotesque combina- 
tions like " fried Indian " have lingered in dialect 
to our time. The season for reaping the familiar 
English grains was called by the emigrants the 
English harvest, the later ingathering of maize was 
the Indian harvest. From this distinction, perhaps. 



Chap. III. 

Acosta, as 

above. 

Comp. 

also Cam- 

panius, 

New 

Sweden. 



Note 8. 



MS. Bk. of 
Instruc- 
tions, Nov. 
II, 1621. 
Comp. E, 
Bland's 
Newe Brit- 
taine, 1651. 
Rev. John 
Clayton to 
Royal So- 
ciety, 1688, 
in Force, 
iii, 20. 



Comp. 
John Hull's 
Diary, 221. 



Note 9. 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



came the name Indian summer for the season of 
balmy weather that befalls in the autumn when a 
halcyon stillness pervades the hazy air and the 
whole landscape lies enchanted. The name was 
probably of merely agricultural origin, but is now- 
adays full of poetic associations with the delicious 
season and a vanished people. 

VII. 

Indian corn became the staple food product of 
the colonists, and English was put to all its make- 
shifts to find names for its parts and products and 
the novel processes attending its culture and uses. 
Stalk, blade, and ear were easily transferred from 
other sorts of corn, but for the blossoms the words 
silk and tassel were felicitous tropes. The enve- 
lope of the ear gave trouble. Megapolensis, an 
early Dutch writer, calls the husks " leaves." 
Strachey, in speaking of " a kind of wheat " which 
the Indians call "poketawes," describes the ears as 
growing each " with a great hose or pill about it." 
The Virginians applied an English dialect word, 
" shuck," to the " hose " about the ear, the New 
England colonist adopted husk, and in the extreme 
South the infelicitous phrase '• corn trash " came 
into use, and all three are still living. Husk, which 
in New England expressed the outer covering of 
the ear, was in the middle and in some southern 
regions quite as fittingly given to the bran, the 
covering of the grain, while in certain regions 
of Virginia the same word, usually pronounced 



Mother English, Folk- Lore, and Literature. 



105 



" huss," meant the cob on which the grains grew ; 
nor is this use yet obsolete. This cob was at first 
called " the coare of the ear," the word cob was in 
New England at first used for the whole ear, as it 
was in English dialect for ears of wheat or barley. 
It has at last come to mean in America the spike 
on which the grains stand. In all this effort of the 
English language to stretch its vocabulary to em- 
brace the new plant and its parts it strangely dis- 
dained to borrow a word from the Indian tongues. 
But when we come to the dishes prepared from 
maize, the Indian words incorporated in our speech 
are living witnesses to the adoption of aboriginal 
cookery. Bread was called ponap in the dialect of 
the James River Indians ; from this word we get 
** pone," variously applied in American English to 
several sorts of maize bread. Ustatahamen, a name 
for the grits or coarser parts of the crushed corn, 
gives us the word hominy. Samp, supawn, succo- 
tash are Indian dishes which brought their ancient 
names with them as a convenient mode of distin- 
guishing them from food preparations of other 
cereals. 

VIII. 

The animals were not easily fitted with English 
titles; their skins and flesh were objects of trade 
between the two races, and many kept a semblance 
of their ancient names. The Virginia mussascus 
of Captain Smith is the 

Civet-scented musquash smelling ever, 
of New England poetry, and his skin appears by 



Chap. III. 



Comp. 
Mather's 
Illustrious 
Provi- 
dences, 113, 
ed. 1850. 



Smith's 
Oxford 
Tract of 
1612. 



Compare 
Sot-weed 
Factor, 
1708. 

Shea's re- 
print, 5. 



Note ID. 



American 
animals. 



Tract of 
1612. 



io6 



The Transit of Civilization. 



this title in the dull prose of English customs 
returns. A Pennsylvania form, " musquasses," ap- 
pears to be midway between the Virginia and the 
New England names. With a gravitation toward 
English forms the word is musquagh in Oldmixon, 
but it changed more swiftly in America ; it was 
sometimes muscat, a name given to the civet, and 
as early as 1649 it was " a muske Rat so-called 
for his great sweetnesse and shape," as though 
the Indian original had been forgotten. As early 
as 1688 Clayton called it mush-rat, a form still 
generally used in rustic speech. Other Indian 
words put on bits of English toggery ; match- 
core was a word in Algonkin dialects meaning a 
deerskin. When the Indian accepted a colored 
blanket from the white man in exchange for his 
matchcore, he gave the same name to his blanket. 
The colonial trader was impelled to put a sem- 
blance of sense into the word by calling it match- 
coat, and the word in this form was widely used 
by the colonists. Copyists of old handwriting, not 
suspecting that it was only a blanket, have made 
it watch-coat, and in this misleading form it will 
puzzle posterity in Irving's prose. The general 
repulsion to the use of aboriginal words was no 
doubt increased by the polysyllabic prolixity of 
the agglutinated vocables that gave stateliness to 
the intervals of utterance with which a savage 
broke the monotony of his native taciturnity. 
Indian words were unhandy vehicles for the 
ideas of a colloquial and gossiping race. Usta- 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



107 



tahamen had to be reduced to hominy to match 
the corresponding English word furmity, applied 
at first to corn. Pawscohicora was split through 
the middle to get the English word hickory, and 
the last syllable of isquontersquash was all that 
could be transplanted into New England Eng- 
lish. Chechinquamen was a hard nut in English 
mouths until the Virginians made it chinkapin. 
Wampumpeak, the Indian name for white shell 
beads used for money, was divided ; wampum 
passed current in one region, and peak or peague 
in another. The New York Dutch called the shell 
money sewant from another Indian word, while 
Virginia shell beads were known as roenoke from 
the Indian rawrenock. In the course of traffic and 
friendship between the two races a sort of pidgin 
English was formed as a medium, a half-breed 
speech only partly intelligible nowadays. Cer- 
tain words of greeting, like " netop," friend, came 
into temporary use among the colonists along with 
honorary titles of leadership, such as the " cock- 
erouse " of Maryland and Virginia, and the " mug- 
wump" of parts of New England. Much of it was 
local and temporary, and the residuum is small. 
To-day the English language, with the tolerance 
of a cosmopolitan, begs or borrows from barbar- 
ous sources the world over, but the home-bred 
speech of the period of American settlement seems 
to have cherished fastidious prejudices against 
foreign words without Latin ancestry to back 
them. 



Chap. III. 



Note 12. 

Wood's 
N. E. 
Prospect, 
58. 

Smith's 

Tract, 

1612. 



See exam- 
ple in 
Ames's 
Almanac, 
1730. 



E. g., Sot- 
weed Fac- 
tor, 19. 
Note 13. 



io8 



The Tra7isit of Civilization. 



IX. 

The absence of a well-established standard for 
English speech in the early Stuart period pro- 
duced confusion in the colonies. Travel was not 
frequent between the several parts of England, and 
local feeling had the intensity of patriotism. Sel- 
den tells us that societies of men from a particular 
shire were formed in London. The men from a 
given county might thus allay the homesickness of 
their exile by meeting those who held to the same 
customs and sauced their speech with the same local 
words and accents. When an American region, 
larger or smaller, was settled by a body of emi- 
grants from the same English neighborhood, many 
of the words and much of the twang of their ancient 
dialect would survive for generations. We have 
here a probable explanation of a marked difference 
of speech between two adjacent communities. John 
Lyon Gardiner recorded, in 1798, that on Long 
Island an Easthampton man might be known from 
a Southampton man " as well as a native of Kent 
may be distinguished from a Yorkshire man." 
The two towns adjoin and the two communities 
had been living side by side for more than a hun- 
dred and fifty years when this wide difference of 
speech was found still persisting. In Dorchester, 
Massachusetts, the land measures retained a local 
English trait ; one finds the old Dorsetshire meas- 
ure of a goad in the early records. In Groton 
there are heard to this day " some little expressions 



Mother Ejiglisk, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



109 



and quaint uses of words " not known twenty-five 
miles away. In yet another Massachusetts town 
such unusual survivals as " dafter " for daughter 
have been noted in recent years. In some regions 
the English dialects must have been neutralized 
by interference ; there were many colonial fami- 
lies in which the mother tongue varied from the 
father's speech. In a single Virginia parish regis- 
ter between 1660 and 1670 emigrants from York- 
shire, on the one hand, and from Kent and Surrey, 
on the other, rub shoulders with men and women 
from the midland of England. Now and then 
the word " native " against a name in the mar- 
riage register marks the young Virginian bred in 
this babellian confusion of English diversities. It 
is hard to say how his speech would be affected by 
the varieties of vocabulary and the contrarieties of 
pronunciation about him. The peculiarities known 
in his descendants of to-day as Americanisms, or 
localisms, he might readily have borrowed from 
both ends of England without leaving his parish, 
possibly without leaving his own doorstone. 



X. 

American rustic lingoes show innumerable ex- 
pressions detached from the ancient dialects and 
rearranged not by hazard, but as the result of influ- 
ences too obscure to be traced. There have been 
natural selection, modification by intermingling, 
and changes of use produced by environment ; no 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



English dialect has bodiTy survived removal. But 
the English origin of our rustic words and accents 
is generally evident. For example, the twang 
longest associated with America by dialect writers 
is the distortion of certain words imperfectly repre- 
sented in the spelling of heouse, teown, and keow, 
for house, town, and cow. Franklin long ago set 
down in Poor Richard's Almanac his observation 
that the residents of Connecticut and Cape May 
called a cow a keow " by a certain involuntary 
twist at the root of the tongue." This crescendo 
vowel is the recognized tag of the burlesque Yan- 
kee of the stage and comic literature. Its feline 
drawl may yet be caught in a state of nature in 
some of the mountain districts of New England, 
but it also exists far to the southward. There are 
London small shopkeepers who, along with a mock 
Latin " dies " for days, have an unmistakable mew 
in " heouse " and " teown " and " abeout." There is 
nothing in English dialect more evidently ancient, 
for it was a trait of the archaic patois of a por- 
tion of County Wexford, in Ireland, which was 
settled by a colony of English people who crossed 
St. George's Channel in the middle ages under 
Strongbow, full two hundred years before Chau- 
cer's Canterbury Tales were written. These me- 
diaeval emigrants took out of England with them 
in A. D. 1 169 and a little later such Yankee forms as 
" greoune " for ground, " pleough " for plow, and 
" teown " for town. They had other words found 
in American rustic dialects so widely distributed 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



Ill 



as not to be local, such as " kotch " for caught, 
" kiver " for cover, " man " for husband. These 
and other words were transplanted from England 
to America four or five hundred years after the 
species had taken root in Ireland. Take another 
of the many examples of tough survival. The 
farmer in some parts of northern New York and 
elsewhere calls a fraction of a wagon load a jag. 
The word was colonial ; in a diary of 1763 a New 
England parson takes pains to set down among the 
small doings of his farm that he had " gott in 2 
jaggs of Rowens." This and other bits of Amer- 
ican dialect can be explained only by going to the 
mother country. In Yorkshire some primitive 
modes of transportation still survive. The pack 
horse that climbs the steep moor side laden with 
coals for the limekilns in the mountains that over- 
look the Dale of the Wharfe is known as the jag- 
ging horse and the burden under which he reels is 
a jag. The American settlers used the jagging or 
pack horse on narrow forest trails throughout the 
colonial period. When wheels in summer and 
sleds in winter took the place of packing or " jag- 
ging," a small load of hay or wheat or rowen, suit- 
able for a horse's back or to be drawn by a single 
horse, was still called a jag. 



XI. 

Negro speech in the early colonies was of as 
many varieties perhaps as there were tribes, and 



Chap. III. 



Note 16. 



MS. in my 
possession. 



Negro 
speech. 



112 



The Transit of Civilization. 



this may be one reason why there remains no con- 
siderable admixture of African words. Broken 
English, some grotesque examples of which are 
recorded, succeeded to the African tongues, and as 
there were large bodies of new negroes it is likely 
that some habitual distortions persisted in negro 
speech. Now and then an African word survived 
for a while. There was " quaqua," an instrument 
of music or of noise, but the word and the thing 
went down together. Buckra, a name for the 
white man on the African coast, reappeared in the 
West Indies and in the Carolinas. Perhaps the 
only old negro word surviving now is " juba," to 
which no definable sense attaches. The negro 
" hit " was court English in Elizabeth's time ; the 
supposed negro words " den," " dey," " dat," for 
them, they, that, appear in verses written in the 
modern dialect of Surrey. African speech has left 
hardly a trace even upon dialect in the United 
States. Slave speech caught its first accents from 
the bond servants and convicts who worked along- 
side the negro and from illiterate overseers. It 
probably preserved much that was worst in the 
English of the seventeenth century. 



XII. 

Social conditions in America affected speech ; 
the environment produced practical changes. The 
old labels applied but imperfectly to new classifi- 
cations. In England a gentleman did not object 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



113 



to the title of servant, which in some cases was 
even an honorable distinction. But the large num- 
ber of bond people sold into America to pay their 
passage, or as a penalty for petty crimes, seem to 
have gradually brought the word servant into dis- 
repute. The bondage of a redemptioner, who 
might be sold from owner to owner, was degrad- 
ing and his treatment was sometimes oppressive. 
Those who were employed not bound were at 
pains to be known by a distinctive term ; hence 
the frequent recurrence of the words " hired serv- 
ant." When negro slaves were added in large 
numbers to the servile class, the name of servant 
was naturally rendered more odious by English 
race pride and Christian detestation of the heathen. 
As early as 165 1 the phrase " any servant or other 
helpe in the family " occurs in the Massachusetts 
Records. " Hired man," " hand," and " hired 
girl " have come into use later from the same dis- 
position to avoid the word servant. This dislike, 
which seems to have been half latent in the colo- 
nies, was greatly helped perhaps by that strange 
and widespread irruption of democratic sentiment 
which occurred in the later colonial and Revolu- 
tionary times. The distinction between a " Good- 
man " and a " Mr." or gentleman had not disap- 
peared in the seventeenth century ; it was in gen- 
eral use at Salem in the time of the witchcraft. 



Chap. III. 



Note 18. 



Rug;gles's 
Hist, of 
Guilford, 
Conn., 
quoted in 
Judd's 
Hadley, 
252. 

Note 19. 



114 



The Transit of Civilization. 



XIII. 

Along with words the early emigrant ships 
brought a supply of proverbs, the accepted coin 
of popular wisdom and almost as long-enduring as 
words. A writer for children in 1583 has phrases 
which are familiar to Americans often in a some- 
what changed form. He says to his reader " looke 
before thou leape " and " thinke or you speake," 
and he says " A byrd in hand as some men say is 
worth ten flye at large." He says " not worth a 
pin " at a time when a hand-made pin was worth 
much more than one of those ground out now in 
myriads. The modern phrase " as plain as a pike- 
staff " appears in its older form in Hall's Satires as 
" pack-staff plaine," the allusion being perhaps to 
the rough stick which a pedestrian traveler laid 
over his shoulders to hang his pack upon. Lord 
Hunsdon writes to Cecil in 1596 that " beggars 
may be no chusers," and two years later he re- 
marks that a " burnt child dreads the fire." 
"Down with his dust" in the modern sense is 
used by Fuller, the quaint church historian. 
When the birth of a young prince who became 
Louis XIV took the world by surprise twenty 
years after the marriage of his parents, an Eng- 
lish letter writer alluded to the overthrow of the 
hopes of the displaced heir by saying, " Monsieurs 
cake is dough." " Thereby lies a tale " is older 
than Shakespeare, who gave the phrase a punning 
form. In a simple life with little literature sen- 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



115 



tentious proverbs abound, and the English of the 
period of settlement had many more of such allu- 
sions than have survived. An Cotton, in her ac- 
count of Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, compares 
the soldiers besieging a camp from which Indians 
had already escaped to Scoggin's wife " brooding 
the eggs which the fox had sucked," an allusion 
to a " merry song " of that time. " Fair play 
from foule gamesters " is another of her phrases. 
When she says that certain events put Bacon 
" and those with him shrodly to their trumps 
believing that a few such deals or shufles . . . 
might quickly ring both cards and game out of his 
hands," she shows us familiar games and popular 
phrases in primitive forms. " Like the corn, light 
between the stones which might grind him to pow- 
der," reminds one of the current phrase " between 
the upper and the nether millstone." " Resolving 
with the Persians to go and worship the rising 
sun," is an everyday acquaintance very slightly 
changed more than two centuries after this clever 
woman wrote in the racy colonial English. Almost 
all our most current proverbial philosophy has 
come down to us from the period when people 
liked to shape their thoughts into epigrams, and 
lacking light literature were fain to spice their 
speech with quaint allusions. Proverbs abounded 
for other reasons in communities where utterance 
was trammeled and phrases with quaint outshin- 
ings were sent from man to man to carry denun- 
ciation in enigmas. " No bullets can pierce beaver 



Chap. III. 



ii6 



The Transit of Civilizatio7i. 



skins " was short and crisp and ambiguous if re- 
ported to the authorities, but the angry Virginians 
expressed in these words their estimate of Berke- 
ley's motives in not making war on the murdering 
Indians lest the fur trade from which he levied an 
enormous personal tribute should be interrupted. 
Believing at last that their oppressions were made 
heavier in order to incite them to rebellion, an- 
other proverb with a more sinister meaning went 
like a courier of discontent up and down the river 
settlements. " Rebel's forfeitures will be loyal in- 
heritances " was the prophetic phrase repeated 
from one indignant planter to his next neighbor. 
Such proverbs do not become folk-lore, they ex- 
press political passion smothered but ready to 
burst into flame. There is another sort of ready- 
made traditional speech that is neither proverb nor 
politics. Friday was of old a marked day among 
the credulous vulgar as it is now, but the ancient 
notion had to do with weather. They called it 
either king or worling (worlding) " bicause it is 
either the fairest or foulest of the seauen." " Ois- 
ters," says Harrison, in 1577, " are generallie fore- 
borne in the foure hot moneths of the 3'eare, . . . 
which are void of the letter R." This rule for 
oysters must have been much older and prevalent 
beyond England. The Dutch over their tankards 
had a humorous variant of it, to the effect that wa- 
ter was to be taken only in months without an r. 
The familiar mnemonic jingle that begins with 
"thirty days hath September," in its older form 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



117 



" hath November," was recited in the days of 
Elizabeth ; its pedigree runs far back to an an- 
cient Latin calendar verse about ideas and nones. 
Trivial as these instances seem, they enable us to 
imagine the motley assortment of antique mental 
furniture vv^ith which the emigrants were outfitted 
for homely thinking and everyday talking in a 
new hemisphere. 

XIV. 

Cotton Mather accounts the visitation of witches 
in 1692 a retribution for the little sorceries of the 
)'Oung people who " would often cure hurts and 
spells and practice detestable conjurations with 
sieves and keys and peas and nails and horse- 
shoes to learn things for which they had a for- 
bidden and impious curiosity." Such minor "con- 
jurations" are still known in by-places, and this 
mode of pretending to satisfy " an impious curi- 
osity " must have been very ancient. That a knife, 
fork, or a pair of scissors which sticks in the fioor 
is lucky was an article of folk-faith in the good old 
colony time, and for how long before no one knows. 
Certain texts of Scripture were in use for divina- 
tion in colonial New Jersey, perhaps by the same 
kind of charm that has been used down to our own 
time, to tell whom the rustic swain or the curious 
kitchen maid will marry. The very ancient Euro- 
pean tradition that the horned cattle uttered audi- 
ble prayers at midnight on each return of the anni- 
versary of Christ's birth in a stable was still handed 



Chap. III. 

Harrison, 
i, 409, 410. 



Folk- 
supersti- 
tions. 



Journal of 
Sarah Eve. 



Barber's 
New Jersey 
Collection, 
149. 



ii8 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. III. 



Romeo and 
Juliet, i, 4. 
Comp. 
Douce, Il- 
lustrations 
of Shales., 
ii, 180. 



Folk- 
literature. 



down to children in the up-country and elsewhere 
in the first half of the nineteenth century. The 
American back-country man, finding his horse's 
mane almost hopelessly tangled in the morning, 
remarks as he tries to extricate it that the 
" witches " have done it. This faded relic of a 
picturesque superstition that came down through 
a long line of English ancestors from the middle 
ages Shakespeare touched into poetry : 

. . . The very Mab 
That plats the manes of horses in the night, 
And bakes the elf-locks into foul sluttish hairs, 
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes. 

The same ancient belief in small deviltries is em- 
balmed in the name " feather-bed witches " yet 
applied to the knotted feathers in a bed. Count- 
less other bits of folk-wisdom were transported to 
American shores as part of the intellectual kit of 
uncritical people. To call such surviving mediaeval 
and ancient beliefs quite useless would be rash ; 
they at least supplied material to the imagination 
and rudely served as substitutes for literature. 



XV. 

The higher forms of folk-lore may be called 
folk-literature. The rustic classic of other days 
was carried in the memory as folk-tale and ballad 
and transmitted orally from generation to gen- 
eration. Legends of place and fairy myths, the 
achievement of giant-killing Jack, and the roman- 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



119 



tic tale of lucky Cinderella, now relegated to the 
nursery, delighted men and women for thousands 
of years. For ages in one form and another inno- 
cent simplicity, wearing a red riding hood, and 
crafty ferocity in the form of a wolf, afforded a 
needed excitement in the long wintry evenings. 
Ballads of love and bloody ballads of slaughter 
were sung while the flicker of failing firelight on 
the wide hearth peopled the remote corners of the 
room with grotesque shadows in motion. Chevy 
Chase and other ballads, the heritage of the Eng- 
lish generations, were chanted to )^oung people, 
keeping alive British tradition and feeHng in the 
American woods. The merry mirth-provoking old 
English songs of primitive humor reappear in Vir- 
ginia. One of these, the Song of Scoggin, is pre- 
served to us by title only in a proscription of it by 
the eminent and godly Mr. Perkins. As the ideas 
and feelings embodied in the old unwritten ballads 
brought over the sea grew dim and remote, these 
same ballads absorbed by degrees, and with no 
more change than was necessary, a flavor of Amer- 
ica. The highly interesting Scottish-English bal- 
lad of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman, for exam- 
ple, the versions of which in Great Britain are 
many, became American when repeated by genera- 
tions who had forgotten the crusades. Susan Pye, 
the Saracen girl, became Suky Fry, an American, 
who, having cared for an English nobleman in 
prison, goes to England to have the same incred- 
ible adventure that befalls the heroine of the older 
9 



Chap. III. 



Compare 
Child's 
Version L, 



I20 



The Transit of Civilization. 



ballad, and she wears the same jewels and is de- 
scribed in almost the same lines. Other ballads 
and songs, manifestly of English origin, were cur- 
rent with slight changes in the older States until 
recent times. But American events sometimes 
gave birth to American rhymes : Bacon's rebellion 
was versified in Virginia, and Lovewell's gallant 
but disastrous fight in Maine gave rise to a gory 
ballad that put Chevy Chase out of countenance, 
and became " the most beloved of all " in New 
England. Very curious and perhaps very antique 
forms of English folk-tales were brought to Amer- 
ica. For example, there was in New England a 
version of the world-old tale of Cinderella known 
as Rose, Pink, and Piney (or Peony), a version 
apparently unknown to collectors of English folk- 
lore, and yet other traditional tales were long pre- 
served in ancient forms that have been lost in the 
mother country. 

XVI. 

Some collections of books were brought to the 
colonies at the outset that might be called large 
libraries in a time when entire libraries of average 
size were often kept in a single chest. Elder 
Brewster, of Plymouth, who had been a printer in 
Holland, left some hundreds of books. John Eliot, 
the Indian apostle, if one may trust family tradi- 
tion, brought twenty-three barrels of literature 
with him. " Worshipful Mr. Winthrop," of Con- 
necticut, had the most princely library of the time 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



121 



in the colonies, though it contained but about a 
thousand volumes. He prized alchemical, astro- 
logical, and other esoteric trumpery ; some of his 
books of this character that yet remain are bound 
in sheets of ancient black-letter with illumi- 
nated initials and in bits of manuscript missals 
in color. Antiques were thus sacrificed as super- 
stitious, perhaps, and used to wrap up favorite 
essays on the philosopher's stone and potable gold, 
superstitions dear to the heart of the learned fel- 
low of the Royal Society. Winthrop had also 
many unpractical works on practical themes — 
books on agriculture and medicine by followers of 
Pliny and Paracelsus. John Harvard had a library 
which was a part of his gift to Harvard College, 
There were a considerable number of books in the 
colonies, but in the first period there was very 
little literature in the strict sense of the word. 
Theology dominated in every collection. If George 
Sandys, the traveler and poet, consoled his lonely 
hours in Virginia with a few books of English 
literature we have no record of it, but he 
brought with him a copy of " the sweet-tong'd 
Ovid," which he rendered into English verse in 
Jamestown " by that imperfect light which was 
snatcht from the hours of night and repose," while 
the unhappy colony of which he was an officer was 
agitated by the alarms of Indian war and pesti- 
lence. Most of the books read in the colonies were 
far removed from the " never-discontinued rhymes " 
of Ovid. There is ever a literature below literature 



Chap. III. 

The re- 
mains of 
Win- 
throp's 
library in 
N. Y. 
Society 
Library. 



122 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. III. 



Smith of 

Nibley 

MSS., 

N. Y. Pub. 

Library. 

Note 21. 



Note 22. 



\ 



that has to do with the hopes and fears, the beliefs 
and aspirations of uncritical people. In 1619 many 
little sub-colonies were fitting out for Virginia. 
With one of these there were sent by the share- 
holders, along with arms and armor, axes and 
beetle rings and provisions, certain necessary books. 
The original list is preserved. There were two 
church Bibles and two books of common prayer. 
The literary outfit was completed by " 2 books 
of the practice of piety, 3 books of the playne 
man's pathway," and " halfe a reme of paper." 
Bishop Bayly's " Practice of Piety directing a 
Christian how to walke that he may please God " is 
at once half mediaeval and wholly Puritan in tone. 
Its popularity and its almost divine authority with 
the men of that age is a remarkable literary phe- 
nomenon. It turns up in almost every Virginia 
probate inventory, and is found far into the eight- 
eenth century, often associated with its running 
mate, Dent's " Plaine Man's Pathway to Heaven 
wherein every man may clearly see whether he 
shall be saved or damned." At the urgent request 
of the eminent Robert Boyle, the Practice of Piety 
was translated into the Indian tongue of Massachu- 
setts. In a Virginia library of five volumes, in 
1648, the inevitable Practice of Piety has for com- 
panions " Mr. Calvin's Institutions " — that is, Cal- 
vin's Institutes — " the true watch," " Christ's com- 
bat with Satan," and " effectual Calling." A Vir- 
ginia clergyman three years earlier left " thirty 
great books in folio, most of them old authors," 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



123 



and " about fifty books in quarto, most of them be- 
ing lattin books." We have here two typical libra- 
ries — the cumbrous folios and the handy square 
small quartos, mostly Latin, of the scholar, on the 
one hand, and the half dozen more or less guide 
books to piety, sound doctrine, and paradise which 
gave a sense of security to a reputable family. It 
was not until the latter half of the century that one 
finds among the richer planters those encyclopedic 
books on various subjects that gave their owners 
an air of general information, and it is only in the 
last quarter of the century that we can trace in the 
houses of a few educated Virginians such master- 
pieces of real literature as Ralegh's History of the 
World and Bacon's Advancement of Learning. 
There were also the Essays of Montaigne, who fig- 
ures in the inventories as " Michael, Lord Mon- 
tague," and the Religio Medici. In an inventory 
of 1699 a copy of Macbeth turns up opportunely to 
give notice that the slowly widening fame of 
Shakespeare had reached the New World before 
the century closed. 

XVII. 

Nothing that can properly be called American 
literature was produced in the colonies in the early 
seventeenth century — nothing worthy of the name 
in its later time. Narratives of American travel 
were written by Captain John Smith and others. 
George Sandys, an English poet, translated Ovid 
while sojourning in Virginia; and Anne Bradstreet, 



Chap. III. 



Note 23. 



American 
literature. 



124 



The Transit of Civilization. 



whose birth and education were wholly English, 
wrote in Massachusetts some clever verses in imi- 
tation of Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas — 
" divine Du Bartas," as he was called, translated by 
" silver-tongued Sylvester," admiration for whom 
was the literary vogue in England in the seven- 
teenth century. But all such productions in the 
first generation belong to English letters ; they have 
no relation of any kind to American literature ; and 
all have gone into an oblivion as profound as that 
which has enveloped the admired Du Bartas him- 
self. Vigorous works of polemical theology were 
produced by the great lights of English Puritan- 
ism exiled to New England, but they were ad- 
dressed to an English audience, and were mostly 
printed in the mother country, where they were 
part of the current debates on church government 
and theology. Notwithstanding the ability of 
their authors, these books have no permanent value 
except as documents of historical reference. 



XVIII. 

Nor can much be said for the writings of the 
period following, when the valetudinarian Wig- 
glesworth produced his Day of Doom, in which 
the Christ is alternately a country judge and a 
fierce Moloch, and where the pious reader con- 
fronts such scenes as the damnation of non-elect 
infants for the guilt of Adam's sin, though they are 
assigned to " the easiest room in hell." The poem 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



125 



is done in the characteristic doggerel of the Bay 
Psalm Book, without taste or humor. Its hideous 
descriptions, irresistibly comic to a modern reader, 
were suited to the temper of the time ; they 
seemed realistic forecasts of the almost imminent 
final catastrophe, and edition after edition was 
sold. Only ten years before the outbreak of the 
American Revolution a Boston paper could speak 
of Michael VVigglesworth's " divine poems." Versi- 
fication was an unreproved amusement in all the 
colonies, but most of the wooden rhymes of the 
time rested in manuscript. In New England the 
habitual use of the printing press gave opportunit}^ 
for prolific facility to win something like distinc- 
tion. Benjamin Tompson was a later and less 
lugubrious writer than Wigglesworth, and he 
achieved fame enough to have it graven on his 
tombstone that he was the " renowned poet of 
New England." The histories of the Indian wars 
of New England, the political tractates, and the 
accounts of Bacon's rebellion in Virginia and the 
poems about it, the indigestible tales with which 
Increase Mather filled his books on illustrious 
providences and ominous comets, the Quaker and 
anti-Quaker diatribes of gall and wormwood, as in- 
deed all the writings in all the colonies during the 
seventeenth century, are almost without exception 
utterly non-luminous. Their lack of any inspiration 
is witness to the truth that notwithstanding intel- 
lectual activity artistic creation is impossible in an 
unsympathetic environment. Life was too material, 



Chap. III. 



Notice ap- 
pended to 
funeral 
discourse 
ofWiggles- 
worth's 
son, Dr. E. 
Wiggles- 
worth. 



Dr. S. A. 
Green in 
Mass. Hist. 
Soc. Proc, 
June, 1895. 



The Transit of Civilization. 



human energy and thought were spent in the battle 
with circumstances and the more bootless struggle 
of petty religious and theological debate. There 
were no detached minds, there could be no pro- 
duction of true literature. The odds would have 
been against Shakespeare himself. 



XIX. 

The age was partly responsible. If there had 
been any love of Nature in the seventeenth century, 
American settlers would have shown some appre- 
ciation of its aspects in a new world. But the pre- 
vailing sentiment of the time was that Nature had 
long been steadily deteriorating, and that the ever- 
lasting frame of the universe was in a state of rack 
and decay. For the sublime in external Nature 
there was no taste. An accomplished English 
traveler in 1621 describes the "hideous" Alps, 
which he had crossed, as " uncouth, huge, mon- 
strous excrescences of Nature." This, we may sup- 
pose, represents the sentiment of English settlers 
toward the grand primeval wilderness about them. 
" Uncouth " is Captain John Smith's only epithet for 
the picturesque wilderness trails through which he 
marched; and George Sandys, though a poet, never 
seems to look upon the wilderness except as an 
obstruction and an enemy. The colonial verse 
writer does not suffer any intrusion into his medi- 
tations of the over-awing effects of Nature, primi- 
tive and unsubdued, as he encountered it. What 



Mother English^ Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



127 



contemplation there is in the books and letters oi 
the time expends itself on the supernatural or 
revels in the merely grewsome. 



XX. 

This " uncouth, huge, monstrous " wilderness 
puts its thumb mark on the character of the people 
otherwise than by contemplation. They grew up 
in the earlier generations woodsmen. Distinctively 
English characteristics fell away from them. The 
exigencies of a new country made them quick- 
witted and shifty. The dignity and repose of 
bearing that belong to a fixed position in an older 
civilization were lost, for the time at least. The 
American was pushing, aggressive, inquisitive. He 
was also more open-minded than his ancestors ; a 
change of circumstances broke up the conservative 
crust of centuries of English life. The "go" of a 
new country came into the new life and a hundred 
years after the early settlement of the colonies an 
English clergyman in Virginia sketches the Amer- 
ican as we have known him — nimble-witted, but 
less patient and profound than the Englishman. 



XXI. 

The survivors of seventeenth century libraries 
let us know what the old books were like. They 
varied greatly in size. There was the princely 
tome in folio, sometimes at least stoutly corded 



Chap. III. 



Men of the 
woods. 



Hugh 
Jones, 
Present 
State of 
Virginia, 
pt. ii, 
chap. V. 



The old 
books. 



128 



The Transit of Civilization. 



and honestly bound in good leather, now and then 
it was gilded and richly tooled. Then there were 
small quartos thick and small quartos thin, some 
bound and tooled, but many stitched and home- 
bound by the owner in parchment sewed through 
and through by strings of sheepskin or clad in 
scraps of old missals or merely covered with leaves 
of old books. Below this the sizes and shapes are 
too various and often too nondescript to be set 
down, running all the way to twent3^-fourmos or 
something of the sort. Regularity in size or shape 
was not important in libraries that usually were 
not shelved but stored in chests. If there were 
Latin works, there would be many in parchment 
cover, or if from the Rhine country some would 
be elaborately stamped in pigskin and held to- 
gether by ockumy clasps. A few manuscripts one 
would be pretty sure to find — a diary or a journal 
of travel, or a controversial tract, or some poems 
innocent of print. From college the owner brought 
in his own handwriting a carefully copied digest of 
logic, metaphysics, divinity, with arithmetic, or 
geometry. He may have added some rules and 
diagrams for land surveying. Many of the manu- 
scripts were transcripts of printed books not easily 
come by in those days. Some professional men of 
the time saved money and learned their texts by 
transcribing from books borrowed from others ; 
and lawyers bound later laws in manuscript in 
the same volume with printed statutes. Works on 
alchemy, with some on the art of war, have come 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



129 



to us in transcripts. The elegance of the old 
decorative " secretary's hand," learned by patient 
application under a writing master or his usher, 
shames the slovenliness of modern scribbling, and 
sometimes excels in beauty the fine old typography 
which carried over the traditional taste and pains- 
taking of the mediseval copyist into a rare mechan- 
ical art. 

Elucidations. 

James Laing, a Scottish writer of the Reformation period, ex- 
presses this contempt for vulgar tongues as proper only to bar- 
barians and heretics : " Tres sunt linguae elegantes et ingenuse, 
Hebraica, Greca, et Latina quse nobilibus principibus sunt dig- 
nae : — Ceteras linguas cum sint barbaree barbaris et hsereticis 
tanquam propriis relinquae." Quoted in McCrie's Life of Knox, 
472. 

Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, is a 
principal authority, but the condition of the language may be 
mainly deduced from the literature of the period. One of the 
sources of corruption noticed and lamented is " the peevish affec- 
tation of words out of primative languages" by "schollers." 
Many " inkhorne termes " were brought in by preachers and 
schoolmasters. The words "penetrate," "penetrable," and "in- 
dignitie " are examples of these fresh intruders. Arber's Putten- 
ham, 156-159. In Alexander Gill's grammar of 1619, quoted in 
Masson's Milton, i, 55, is a denunciation of the intrusion of words 
of Latin origin, such as " common, vices, envy, malice " and " vir- 
tue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, 
color, grave, favor, acceptance." " But whither pray," demands 
Gill, " in all the world have you banished those words which our 
forefathers used for these new fangled ones.? Are our words to 
be exiled like our citizens ? " The enriching of the language with 
Latin and French terms was inevitable ; the three languages had 
been in juxtaposition in England for centuries, and they were 
sometimes jumbled together unconsciously. In Brayleyand Brit- 
ton's History of Hertfordshire is an example of a three-ply inter- 
weaving of the languages in an old Description of the Manor and 



Chap. III. 



Note I, 
page 96. 



Note 2, 
page 97. 



I30 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Manor House of Rye: " Item granarum, i6 equi et vaccae, cum 
le storehous mercandizarum 2000 marcae, Item le byldyng de le 
inner court edificat cum bryke," etc. Many such triple macaroni 
passages could be accumulated. 

" And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that 
whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne. For we eng- 
lysshe men ben borne vnder the domynacon of the mone which 
is neuer stedfaste. . . . And that comyn englysshe that is spo- 
ken in one shyre varyeth from a nother." Caxton's Prologue to 
the Eneydos, A. D. 1490. The changes in speech in the sixteenth 
and early seventeenth centuries were nearly as rapid as in the 
time of Caxton. Take this intimation from Evelyn's Diary in the 
year 1654: " Here [at Beverly] a very old woman shew'd us the 
monuments, and being above one hundred years old spake the 
language of Queen Marie's dales, in whose time she was born." 

"Victories, plantations, frontieres, staples of commerce," etc., 
are enumerated by John Evelyn as " reasons both of additions 
and corruptions, of the English Language." All changes of 
usage were accounted corruptions, and stay-at-home men have 
grieved for three centuries over the " corruptions " introduced into 
the tongue from the various oiTshoots of the mother country. 

The word "turkish" had perhaps come to signify "foreign" 
or " outlandish " in European tongues. It is to be noted that a 
third German name for the turkey •wa.swdlsches huhn, the foreign 
fowl. This may indeed be sufficient reason for "turkish corn" 
in several languages, as wiilsch-korn or foreign corn is one of the 
designations of maize in German. 

John Clayton, the parson, says in a letter to the Royal Society 
in the seventeenth century about Virginia : " There's a great sort 
of ravenous Bird that feeds apon Carrion as big very nigh as an 
Eagle, which they call a Turkey Bustard, . . . whence its name ; 
it is nothing of the same sort of Bird as our Turkey Bustard." 
Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 defines " bustard " by " a wild tur- 
key." We may not conclude from Clayton's term that the great 
vulture was called a turkey bustard before he became a buzzard, 
for a dozen years earlier in these Transactions, xi, 631. Glover 
writes " Turkie Buzzard," and very much earlier yet, in 1614, 
Hamor has " Turkie Bussards." The author of the True Decla- 
ration of Virginia, 1610, does not know either name ; he calls the 
birds "cormerants." One might suspect that the name is a cor- 
ruption of "bastard turkey" (compare "bastard plover" in the 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



131 



regulations of Henry VIII's household, Forsyth's Antiquary's 
Portfolio, i, 187), or that it has some relation to the French din- 
don batard, but there is no evidence in favor of such a conjecture. 
The vulture was often mistaken for the turkey. Castiglioni Viag- 
gio negli Stati Uniti, i, 225. We have indeed a tangle of the 
names of two large European birds, the buzzard and the bustard, 
with the American turkey and turkey buzzard. It is with pleas- 
ure that I pass the puzzle to philologists. Apropos of the pos- 
sible confusion one way or the other between dtndon bastard and 
turkey bustard or buzzard, there is in Le Page du Pratz, Histoire 
de la Louisiana, 1738, ii, 418, a curious distortion of another Eng- 
lish name of this same vulture, which he calls " Carencro " [that 
is, carrion crow], " qui est aussi noir qu'un Merle & aussi gros 
qu'un Dindon." 

The suggestion of Acosta is that since the Italians call maize 
grano turco, Pliny's description of millet may have been intended 
for maize, and that the plant may have been known to the ancients. 
It was as hard to believe in that day that there was anything of 
value unknown to Pliny as that there could be any truth of phi- 
losophy not deducible from Aristotle. The confusion between 
buckwheat, or " saracen wheat " as it was called, and the newer 
maize, though not heretofore suspected, is almost beyond doubt. 
Lescarbot, in LaConversiondes Savvages, 1 610, gives a list of plants 
cultivated by the Iroquois. In it there appears " du bl6 mahis 
(ou Sarazin)." In the Burrows reprint of the Jesuit Relations, i, 
85, this passage is Englished by "maize wheat (or Buckwheat)." 
If this rendering were correct, it would still show the confu- 
sion of the two, but Lescarbot did not suppose any grain but 
maize to exist among the Indians. " Sarazin " is here but an- 
other name for maize, in explanation of the less familiar " ble 
mahis," or more properly " mays." The name in French or 
Italian was conferred, no doubt, when it was yet not well distin- 
guished from buckwheat, and it was probably used at first inter- 
changeably with ble de turquie, the notion of origin conveyed 
being identical in the two names. " Grano saraceno " appears 
to be still applied in Italian to both maize and buckwheat. Ba- 
retti's Italian-English Dictionary, edition of 1854, has no other 
definition of " grano saraceno " than maize, while it defines maize 
by " fromentone, grano saraceno, grano turco." Yet Castiglioni 
adheres to " frumento saraceno " or "grano saraceno " for buck- 
wheat, and " grano turco " for maize. Viaggio negli Stati Uniti 
(1785, 1787), i, 36; ii, 7, and passt'm. 



132 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Strachey, in his account of Virginia in the "yearely daies " of 
the colony, to imitate his expression, says of the beans of the 
Indians, " Their beanes . . . are the same which the Turks call 
garvances," an identification as wide of the mark as most of those 
on which names of American plants are founded. In 1633 De 
Vries, the Dutch explorer, was making his way up the Delaware 
to secure some of the " Boonen van de Wilde," or Indian beans, 
and these on the next page he calls " Turchse Boonen" — that is, 
Turkish beans. Korte Historael, etc., loi, 102. In the English 
version of Acrelius " Turkish beans " and " large beans " appear 
as two of the garden vegetables cultivated in New Sweden. The 
original Swedish at p. 167 has " Turskska Bonor " and " stora 
Bonor," which in our common speech would be Turkish beans 
and pole beans, indicating that the so-called Turkish beans were 
not grown on poles, but, as we know, twined themselves about 
the growing corn stalks. In the papers reviewing and, it might 
be said, enriching De Candolle's Origin of Cultivated Plants, the 
learned authors. Gray and Trumbull, have missed the passage 
above in De Vries, which would have shown the error in Van der 
Donck that they suspect. See American Journal of Science for 
August, 1883, p. 134. Van der Donck is so far misled by the 
name " Turkish" as to suppose the Indian bean to have been in- 
troduced by the Dutch. The name gallivance is applied to some 
plant in Pennsylvania soon after Penn's settlement, and in a Com- 
plete Discovery of the state of Carolina. 1682, the name appears as 
" Callavance," from which we need not infer the presence of the 
garabanzo as cultivated in Spain, Mexico, etc., but merely a con- 
fusion of very different plants by people who had not seen both. 

The New England " rye and Indian" was known in the 
eighteenth century, and perhaps earlier ; it figures strangely in 
Castiglioni's Italian as " grano turco misto con segale formano 
delle crescenze senza Hevito." The phrases "English grain" 
and "English grass" appear to have survived in New England 
until the American Revolution abolished all things English, in 
name at least. In a manuscript diary of Rev. Justus Forward, 
of Belchertown, Mass,, in my possession, it is set down, un- 
der date of June 15, 1763, that "grass and English grain look 
extraordinary well" ; and on the preceding May nth the diarist 
notes that there is " considerable feed in English pasture." 

The use of husk for the bran or covering of the grain was in 
accordance with English usage at the time. A Virginia writer, 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



133 



in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1666, uses the verb 
" un-husk " in spealiing of rice and barley. Clayton, the clergy- 
man, in writing of Virginia in the Philosophical Transactions, 
speaks of husks of the kermes or little galls on oak trees. The 
application of the word to the bran of the corn, the skin or husk 
of the grain, was thus very natural. In some doggerel by Davy 
Crockett when a boy these lines occur : 

She sifted the meal, she give me the huss ; 
She baked the bread, she g^ive me the cms. 

This use of husk I found still extant in Charleston, S. C, in 1884. 
" Nubbin," used in English provincial dialects for the stump of a 
tree, came into general use in America for a dwarfed ear of corn, 
and I suspect that some analogous use of the word existed in 
colloquial English at the time. Roasting ears, an early name for 
green corn in the Chesapeake and middle colonies, is yet applied 
to green corn however cooked, and whether cooked or not, over 
a large part of the United States. Compare Beverley's Virginia, 
book iii, 15, and Rush's letter in Castiglioni, Viaggio negli Stati 
Uniti, ii, 44. Acosta speaks of a large round variety of corn that 
the Spaniards ate roasted " as a delicious food, more savoiy than 
roast beans or peas." Livre iv, chap. xvi. 

The aroughcun of John Smith goes through innumerable 
forms. There is raconne very early in Morton's New English 
Canaan, p. 79, and in the perfect Description of Virginia of 1649 ; 
ratoons in Wilson's Account of Carolina, 1682 ; and roacoans in 
the State of England, 1683, p. 63. Barrett's maps, of about 
1775, have three forms — " Aroughena, a sort of badger," and 
"roscones," in the same Virginia list ; in the New England list 
the animal is " rackoon." 

It is pohickory in some early writings, as in Baltimore's " Re- 
lation " of 1634, where it is said to be a " wild sweet wall-nut." 
The hickory nut is still called a walnut in parts of New England 
and New York ; it is the white walnut in contradistinction to the 
black. But Gronovius's Flora Virginica, 150, calls the butternut 
white walnut thus : " Juglans alba . . . Anglice white walnut, 
Clayton "■ — that is, on the authority of Clayton, the Virginia 
botanist. It is still usually so called in communities of Virginia 
derivation. 

Barbecue is generally accounted a West Indian word, but it 
was in general use in the colonies, and may have been known to 



Chap. III. 



Note II, 
page 106. 



Note 12, 
page 107. 



Note 13, 
page 107. 



134 



The Transit of Civilization. 



some of the Indians of the mainland. Beverley, in his history of 
Virginia, 1705, says that the Virginia Indians have a second way 
of " broyling ... by laying it upon Sticks raised upon Forks at 
some distance above the live Coals, which heats more gently . . . 
this they, and we also from them, call Barbacueing." The word 
is elsewhere among the colonists " barbecute," and is applied to 
the roasting of venison wrapped in leaves in the ashes. Compare 
also Bossu's Nouveaux Voyages, 1777, where barbecue is traced 
to an Indian word, barboka, which signified the wickerwork — 
" les claies " — on which the meat was laid. Page 178 and foot- 
note. 

Compare this word dafter, for daughter, with the old pro- 
nunciation "oft," for ought. In the Order of Orthography, by 
Joseph Prat, London, 1622, the word ought is thus given " oft." 
Prat lays it down as a rule that where " s " precedes the terminal 
" tion," the sound shun must not be given, by which rule the 
accepted form of such words in good speech would be, for ex- 
ample, combus-ti-on. Honor and honour, favor and favour, are 
" indifferently written," says Prat. The word mile is unchanged 
in the plural, as " one mile, twenty mile." As an example of the 
" barbarous speech of the common people," he has "yerbs" for 
herbs, " dater " for daughter, " twenty " for twenty, " feale " and 
"finegar" for " veale and vineger." 

This mixing of variant forms of rustic English was kept up 
by fresh arrivals from England, and in the eighteenth century it 
was complicated by the great exodus of people to some of the 
colonies from the north of Ireland. Manifest traces of this Scotch- 
Irish admixture may be found in Pennsylvania, in the Ohio Valley 
and westward, and along another line of emigration in the Appa- 
lachian valleys and the table-lands of Virginia and the Carolinas. 

" Gom," in this dialect of the Forth and Barg^, means a 
simpleton ; in other local English it is, as in America, " gump." 
" Goss " in various dialects means gorse or furze. As gorse is 
not known in the United States the word has no popular mean- 
ing, but it has survived in the single dialect phrase often heard in 
certain places, " Give him goss ! " — that is, a chastisement as 
with gorse or furze. 

The following nonsensical verse was remembered by my 
father as sung by the Virginia slaves in his boyhood — that is to 
say, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century : 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



135 



Juba dis an' juba dat, 
An' juba roun' de kittle o' fat ; 
Juba heah, an' juba dah, 
An' juba, juba ebry whah. 

In the coast region of South Carolina, where the negroes are 
much the larger part of the population, and where " new ne- 
groes '' were run in from Africa at a late period, the corrupt 
speech is called the Gullah dialect, from the Gullah or Angola 
negroes. The vocabulary has few words that are not evidently 
English in origin. The effect is somewhat that of English badly 
spoken by a foreigner, who ignores the natural quantity of the 
vowels. There is a French nasal in the sound of final n — fine, 
for example, takes the sound of the French fin. 

In Smyth's Tour, i, 235, he remarks on the unwillingness to 
be called a servant by the frontiersman of the late colonial period. 
The use of the word servant was evidently narrower in the colo- 
nies than in England, though Mr. Albert Matthews has furnished 
me with several references to " hired servant " and " hired servant 
man " in the first half of the eighteenth century. As some of these 
were in advertisements of runaways, the hired servant must have 
been bound by contract for a year, according to the custom at 
that time. Even in such advertisements for runaways in New 
Jersey, Mr. Matthews notes the term " an Irish hired man," and 
he has furnished me with a number of instances of the modern 
use of the word " help '' in England for a person employed in a 
capacity a little above that of a domestic servant. Under date of 
Philadelphia, December 6, 1748, Kalm says that a distinction was 
made by the English inhabitants of Pennsylvania between a serv- 
ant and a " serving or bond servant " for a term of years. As the 
phrase does not occur in any adv^ertisement of runaways or else- 
where, so far as I know, its use must have been local. Servant 
was applied to a slave, and thus the depth of infamy was reached. 

In Halliwell's English Dialects, 28, there is a Lovers' Dialogue, 
a Wiltshire piece. " Hold not so breach now,'' says the maiden 
to her wooer. The word is in the exact sense of the popular 
American word " brash," and sheds some light on its derivation, 
regarding which both the Oxford Dictionary and the Century 
Dictionary grope a little for want of this instance. In a fifteenth 
century Essex poem in Halliwell — 

Be thou never to smert 
To her mennys consayle — 

is an older form of an Americanism — " too smart to take advice." 



Chap. III. 



Note 18, 
page 113. 



Note ig, 
page 113. 



136 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chief-Justice Morris, of New York, in 1737 said in the Zenger 
trial, " An ingenious man has smartly enough observed," etc. 
In the couplet — 

Tharefore y wylle me holly halde 

To that language that Englisch ys calde — 

quoted in Halliwell's Dialects, p. 7, from a MS., the word " holly," 
for wholly, suggests the " New England umlaut," as it has been 
called. In Hearne's works there is an extract from a version of 
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede which closes with the words — 

And in the heighe holy gost holly I beleue, 
where the difference between the words " holy " and " wholly " 
appears to be that which one often hears in New England, even 
among educated people. I have pointed out in a previous note, 
on the authority of Franklin, the early existence in parts of Penn- 
sylvania of what are now deemed New England peculiarities. 
John Bartram, the Pennsylvania botanist, probably used the 
umlaut pronunciation Hke a Vermonter. In his Observations he 
writes, " We rod over middling land," p. 66. " To get shut of,'' 
for to get rid of, appears in various English and American dia- 
lects. " Bail " for the handle of a pail or kettle is still used in 
dialect in England. It appears in a will of 1463, where the Eng- 
lish editor finds it needful to explain it. Compare Bury Wills, 
23, 242. It is in general use in the southern and western parts 
of the United States, and accounted a preferable word. " My 
woman " appears more than once in Braithwayt's Drunken Bar- 
naby, 124, 171, as a respectful equivalent for my wife, with 
" uxor " on the opposite page as the Latin. This is precisely the 
usage of the rustic people in New England ; farther south the 
farmer says " my old woman," though his wife be never so 
young. " Party " for person, which modern purists account 
recent and reprehensible slang, was in abundant use in older 
times. Increase Mather has the " sick party recovered," Provi- 
dences, 192, and one even hears of dear parties. The Camden 
Miscellany, vol. iii, quotes from MS. : 

The partie nowe is gone and closelie clade in clay. 
In northern regions of the United States a sick person is said by 
the country people to be " handled " by his disease. In How- 
ard's Collection of Letters, 273, the Duke of Norfolk writes to 
Henry VIII, " I have ben so sore handeled with myne old Dis- 
ease," and there are other examples. " Fall " for autumn is now 
mainly American, but there are English precedents enough for it, 
and it would be a pity to lose from literary use so good a word. 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, ajid Literature. 



137 



There are instances of its early use in the colonies sometimes in 
the full form, as " this last fall of the leafe." Virginia Calendar, 
1688. (But what is " the fall of the leafe " directed to be taken 
out in drawing a fowl in the Compleat Cook of 1658?) Parson 
Clayton, writing of Virginia, says, " When they go a Shooting 
or Hunting, as they call it," etc. He marks here an early differ- 
ence of usage that has persisted. It has been asserted that 
" rooster " is a word produced by American mock modesty. But 
" roost-fowl," at least, was a form that appeared as early as 1701, 
Sewall's Diary, vi, 33, and I have seen " roost-cock " in English 
use earlier than the beginning of colony planting. " Toat railes " 
appears in' the Remonstrance of Gloucester County, Virginia, as 
early as 1677. State Paper Office, Virginia Papers, 62. Tote 
must have been of English origin. It appears in a Boston paper 
before the Revolution, and is found in the old " tote roads " of 
Maine. But there are words of distinctly colonial origin. " Gum " 
for beehive in some local dialects, came from the use of a section 
of a hollow gum tree for hiving bees and other purposes. Com- 
pare " a large cask or gum " in Virginia Gazette, June 21, 1744, 
and the Western pioneer's proverbial boast that he was cradled in 
a " bee-gum." The number of illustrative instances that might 
be given from my own notes alone would require a volume. See 
two papers in Century Magazine, April and October, 1894. 

For Sukey Fry and other ballads I am indebted to my daugh- 
ter, Mrs. Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye. They were taken from the 
lips of an old lady of New England birth and lineage who may 
have been the last person treasuring these bits of colonial folk- 
lore. She could remember only a few verses of Sukey Fry, sup- 
plying the rest by narrative. " A young nobleman coming to 
America met a young girl, Sukey Fry, and they fell in love. He 
was put into prison, and she visited him and carried him things to 
eat. He agreed, when released, to wait for her seven years un- 
married. He returned to England : 

" Seven years passed away, 
And seven years more followed on. 

He at length married some one else. The scene is at the wed- 
ding. The servant at the door says : 

" ' At your gate, sir, stands the fairest creature 
That ever my two eyes did see ; 
On every finger she has a diamond, 
And on her breast plates one, two, three. 



Chap. Ill, 



Note 20, 
page 120, 



138 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



The golden ringlets on her shoulders, 

Are worth more than you and your bride too.' 

" Lord Bateman smote his hand upon the table, 
And split the leaf in pieces three, 
' I'll stake my life and all my living 
That Sukey Fry has crossed the sea ! ' 

The father of the bride says : 

" ' Oh, cursed be that Sukey Fry, 
I wish she had on the ocean died ! ' 

Lord Bateman rephes : 

" ' I married your daughter to-day 'tis true, 
I'm sure she's none the worse for me ; 
She rode here on my horse and saddle, 
She may go home in her coaches free.' " 

See the many versions of the ballad in Child's Scottish and 
English Ballads, and especially Child's learned treatment of its 
variations in the quarto edition, part ii, 454-483. One can not 
but regret that Professor Child did not have the pleasure of 
knowing that the " Isbel," "Dame Essels," "Susy Pye," and 
"Sophia," of other versions had emigrated with the colonists and 
assumed the name of Sukey Fry. Many comparisons with the 
Scottish and the English versions suggest themselves, but they 
must be left for folk-lorists. But is it on account of the name 
" Susy Pye " in the ballad, or perhaps on account of the sense of 
colored or painted in the word " pie," or " pye " that this seems to 
have been a name for a Moor.? In the Records of Massachusetts 
Colony, 1638, p. 239, " George Pye, a Moor," appears. Rose, 
Pink, and Piney is among the tales collected by Mrs. Seelye. 
Piney is the most frequent pronunciation of peony in rustic speech. 
There is an allied story in the little collection referred to called 
Pussy Catskin. It is substantially the same story as that given 
in Catskin's Garland in Child's Ballads, but the American version 
is in prose and much more antique than the ballad as Child gives 
it. The word trencher is preserved in it, though the meaning of 
the word must have been very obscure to those who recited it 
last. The tale is known in many tongues. See Child's English 
and Scottish Ballads, viii, 172 ff. See also Marian Roalfe Cox's 
Cinderella. 

In 1697 All Faith's Parish received a library from " the Honor- 
able Kenellem Chiseldene." It was composed as follows : " foure 
Bibles, one booke called the whole duty of man, three bookes in 
defence of the Common prayer, three Catekisme, and one lecton 



Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature. 



139 



booke " — that is, a "lecture" book as it is elsewhere called, per- 
haps a book of homilies. Vestry Book of All Faith's, Manuscript 
in Maryland Historical Society. We have here, and in the in- 
stance cited in the text, traces of the ancient custom of keeping 
certain books in the churches, sometimes chained. Compare 
Marsden's early Puritans, 236. See the seventeen books provided 
for the use of the first clergyman in New Netherlands, O'Calla- 
ghan's History of New Netherlands, i, 454. 

After much seeking I found a copy of the Practice of Piety 
where it was least to be expected, in the Graham Library at the 
Century Club, New York. It owes its preservation from the 
destruction that has befallen a myriad other copies to the chance 
that Samuel Butler once owned it and wrote some lines in it. 

Prof. C. E. Norton, in his Life of Anne Bradstreet prefixed to 
a modern edition of her poems, says, " There is, I believe, no 
evidence that there was a copy of Shakespeare's plays in Massa- 
chusetts during the seventeenth century." Apropos of a line of 
Mrs. Bradstreet's which resembles the line in Hamlet, v, ii, 337, 
388, this remark is made. But, as Mrs. Bradstreet was an inmate 
of the family of the Earl of Lincoln in her youth, and a late 
and reluctant adherent to New England Puritanism, she may 
have seen Hamlet on the stage in England. Shakespeare was 
never mentioned or quoted by any American writer in the seven- 
teenth century, so far as I know. Even in England his fame was 
of slow growth. Peacham's Compleat Gentleman, 1660, calls 
George Buchanan, whose fame rests on his Latin poems, " the 
prince of poets of our time," and he does not think Shakespeare 
worth naming at all. The bare word " Macbeth " in the Virginia 
inventory of Captain Arthur Spicer, 1699, is the first allusion to 
his work from an American source that I know. Another Vir- 
ginian, Edmund Berkeley, who died in 17 18, had Shakespeare's 
works. William and Mary Quarterly, ii, 134, 250, 2iX\di passim. 

Nathaniel Ward, a contemporary, says of Anne Bradstreet 

that she is " a right Du Bartas girle." A single verse of hers 

will serve to illustrate her method and her admiration for her 

model : 

But when my wondering eyes and curious heart 

Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o'er, 
Fool do I grudge the muses did not part 

Twix him and me the overfluent store. 

The reader who cares to see what the so-called American 
literature of this time was, may consult Mr. Tyler's History of 



Chap. III. 



Note 22, 
page 122. 



Note 23, 
page 123. 



Note 24, 
page 124. 



140 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. III. 



Note 25, 
page 125. 



American Literature, or Mr. Stedman's Library of American 
Literature. 

Tlie custom of making a library by transcription prevailed 
among the lawyers in Edward I's day, according to Lord Camp- 
bell. Lives of the Chancellors, i, chap, xi, cited in Allibone's 
Dictionary, p. 1993. The Reverend Edward Taylor, of West- 
field, Mass., in the last quarter of the seventeenth and the early 
eighteenth century, copied more than a hundred borrowed books. 
Nearly all his professional books were copied by himself, and " his 
manuscripts were all handsomely bound by himself in parch- 
ment." Sibley's Harvard Graduates, ii, 410. There are volumes 
of old Virginia statutes in the Library of Congress partly manu- 
script. As late as 1 7 1 5 (chap, xxv) Maryland enacted that all 
acts passed should be transcribed on parchment and sent to each 
county, to be lodged with the clerk after they had been " pub- 
lished and proclaimed in court." A like usage prevailed in other 
colonies. The Mennonites in Pennsylvania were advised from Eu- 
rope to transcribe the colossal Martyr Book for their own edifica- 
tion. Many examples of books written which were never destined 
for print might be given. President Stiles's manuscripts and those 
by William Byrd, of Westover, are notable examples. In my own 
collection are manuscripts some of which seem to be sixteenth 
century copies of books probably in print, others are manuscripts 
of the seventeenth century not intended for print. There are also 
manuscript books on various studies, especially geom.etry and 
surveying, that appear to have belonged to old New York families. 
The custom of college students making manuscripts came with 
the first settlers. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 
vi, 102, 103. 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH. 

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES OF CONDUCT. 



I. 

In recent times the preconception that gives its 
color to moral judgment is the belief in an equality 
of rights for all. To do justice to the weak, to de- 
fend the helpless, to free the enthralled — this, in a 
nutshell, is the moral passion of the present age ; a 
passion which sometimes obscures other phases of 
human duty. But when English settlers first broke 
ground in the New World the prevalent notions of 
life and obligation were ever37where monarchical 
and aristocratic. Primary duties were to those 
above you — to God, to the king, to the magis- 
trate, to the social superior. Special privileges 
and exemptions rightfully belonged to the man 
of high birth and official position ; worship and 
authority were theirs by divine right. " Noble or 
Gentle-men," says the author of The Compleat 
Gentleman, " ought to be prefered in Fees, Hon- 
ors, Offices, and other dignities of command and 
government, before the common people." This 
was the voice of the age, which even thought that 
rank exempted its possessor from challenge when 
he cheated or bore false witness. ** We ought to 
give credit to a Noble or Gentle-man before any 

141 



Chap. IV. 

The aris- 
tocratic 
concep- 
tion in 
morals. 



Comp., for 
example, 
Cotton's 
Abstract of 
Laws, 
1641, i, I, 
and iv, 3. 



Peacham's 
Compleat 
Gentle- 
man, ed. 
1661, pp. 
14, 15- 



The Transit of Civilization. 



of the inferior sort. He must not be arrested or 
pleaded against on Cosenage." The intrusions of 
gentlefolk with hawk or hound into the fields of 
poor men were not to be resisted, however ruin- 
ous they might be. " They ought to take their 
recreations of hunting and hawking, etc., freely 
without controul in all places." This rather abject 
reverence for superiors extended to domestic life. 
The shining virtue of a wife was obedience ; resist- 
ance to a husband was rebellion against God. The 
son served his parents in menial subjection ; in 
some houses he was required to attend them at 
table as a servant. He was often sent to play serv- 
ing man to some greater kinsman, in order to learn 
the etiquette of subjection to superiors. When the 
well-trained lad encountered his father or mother 
he did them reverence and said, "Sir," or "Madam, 
I crave your blessing." In such an age it was 
easy for New England lawgivers to revert to the 
severity of the Mosaic law against disobedient 
children. Harsh penalties were denounced against 
" child or servant convict of any stubborne or re- 
bellious caridge against their parents or govern- 
ors," and incorrigibleness was " adiudged to be a 
sin of death " by Puritan lawmakers. 



II. 

Not only reverence for parents and masters, but 
the sentiment of reverence for rank was brought to 
America, and cherished as an inseparable element 



Weights a7id Measures of Conduct. 



143 



of piety. Subordination to social superiors was 
accounted the only basis of order. Distinctions 
were nicely marked ; it has been estimated that of 
the emigrants to New England before 1649, about 
one in fourteen was entitled to the prefix of " Mr.," 
the rest were called simply "Goodman So-and- 
so." Harvard students took their place in the 
catalogue according to the social position of their 
parents as appraised by the academic authorities, 
and the lad of humbler birth yielded the baluster 
side of the stairs to one conventionally his supe- 
rior. The seats in New England meeting-houses 
were formally " dignified," a process by which 
their relative value as a mark of rank was fixed, 
and it was then decided by carefully weighing 
against one another the various offices in town and 
church and trainband, as well as by comparison 
of estates, who should sit in the places of honor. 
Social aspirants seeking to advance themselves by 
intruding into seats higher than those assigned to 
them, created disturbance in the meeting-house, 
and their ambitions had to be repressed by fines. 
In the Chesapeake colonies emblems of rank were 
sometimes attached to the pew of a governor or 
other officer, and the great families of the parish — 
those from whom justices of the peace and vestry- 
men were chosen — were wont to lend the coun- 
tenance of good society to divine worship from 
exclusive pews perched high in the gallery under 
the roof, like swallows' nests, or placed at some 
point of conspicuity on the floor below. For 



Chap. IV. 



Judd's 

Hadley, 

251. 



144 



The Transit of Civilizatioti. 



humble people to dress " above their degree " was 
clearly sinful, because " they that wear soft cloth- 
ing are in kings' houses," according to Scripture. 
So declared the New England Synod of 1679, 
which stigmatized the rising of a democratic spirit 
at that time as "a refusing to be subject to order, 
according to Divine Appointment." It was even 
in accordance with the notions of the time that 
the scales of justice should slant a little toward 
a plaintiff or defendant of dignity, and a high-born 
felon did not lose the benefit of his birth. In 
Maryland, for example, the criminal of quality was 
to be beheaded according to English precedent, 
and not hanged like a vulgar rogue, while Massa- 
chusetts politely refused to send "any true gentle- 
man " to the whipping-post. 

In the colonies generally the dignity of a ruler 
was guarded like the ark of the Lord, and a spec- 
tacular show of reverence was made to judges and 
governors by means of escorts of gentlemen or 
sergeants with halberds. Criticism of magistrates 
in the early colonial period was little less than 
blasphemy. Pitiful was the case of a Mrs. Oliver, 
whose opinions were too large for a narrow time. 
Publicly whipped for reproaching the Massachu- 
setts magistrates, this brave woman of rare gifts 
bore her cruel chastisement without binding. 
Years afterward her animadversions on the clergy 
were cleverly refuted by pinching her tongue for 
half an hour between the forks of a cleft stick. A 
poor devil of a servant, who ventured to reproach 



I 



Weights and Measures of Co7iduct. 



145 



the magistrates in 163 1, had his plebeian ears 
cropped. " I saw it done," says Roger Clap with 
righteous exultation. If Cotton's scheme had been 
adopted in 1641, all unpleasant 'criticisms of God's 
appointed would have been strangled outright by 
the hangman's rope. 

Til. 

This upward trend of moral obligation was as- 
sociated with a more fundamental notion. The 
age summed up its body of ethical doctrine in the 
compact statement that " the chief end of man is to 
glorify God." This doctrine, lisped by babes and 
sucklings, found its counterpart in the declaration 
of the famous Westminster Assembly, that the only 
living and true God " works all things according 
to the Counsell of his owne . . . Will for his owne 
glory." Men were taught to be good, not from 
any aspiration for honesty or goodness, nor out of 
any regard for the rights and welfare of others, but 
solely with reference to the will and pleasure of 
God. " This Good Pleasure or Will of God is the 
rule of Righteousness," says John Norton, the Mas- 
sachusetts Calvin. The moral law was made moral 
by divine command ; theft would not have been 
wrong had there been no commandment. " That 
the moral law should be a constant rule of man- 
ners," says Norton, " is from the Meer Will of God." 

IV. 

We have intruded here into the region where 
" reason builds beyond Nature, but into emptiness 



Chap. IV. 

Cotton's 
Abstract, 
vii, 13, 14. 
Mass. Hist. 
Coll., vol. i. 
Comp. 
Code of 
Mass., 
1649. 143- 



Theocrat- 
ic ethics. 



Note 2. 



The Hum- 
ble Advice 
of the As- 
sembly of 
Divines 
concerning 
a Confes- 
sion of 
Faith, 
chap. iv. 

Note 3. 



Submis- 
sion to the 
king. 



146 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Compare 
T. B.'s 
Royal 
Charter 
granted 
unto Kings 
by God 
Himself, 
1649. 



The state 
secondary 
to the 
Church. 



only," as Schiller has it. But many practical con- 
sequences were deduced from the speculative no- 
tion of God as a despot who was the arbitrary 
source of right and wrong and who sought nothing 
but his own glory. It was the period of emblemism 
in theology, the period of the doctrine of corre- 
spondences in philosophy and of signaturism in 
medicine. To the mind of the time a clever meta- 
phor was more convincing than an argument, and 
an analogy was almost irrefutable. Passive obedi- 
ence to the reigning sovereign was fortified by the 
prevailing conception of right and wrong as de- 
pendent solely on the pleasure of the Deity. But 
the great leaders of Puritanism, finding their plans 
opposed by royal authority, cleverly succeeded in 
making the rule work the other way. From the 
notion of God's relation to morals they evolved an 
ideal of theocracy. Divine sovereignty became a 
cover for latent disobedience to the king. " The 
allegiance we owe to our dread sovereign lord King 
Charles " is the courtly phrase of Cotton, but while 
he thus doffs his hat to the king with his right 
hand, he furtively opens a back door of escape 
with the left, by adding the ambiguous saving 
clause, " whilst he is pleased to protect us as his 
loyal subjects." 

V. 

Puritan theory was strangely akin to ultramon- 
tanism in one regard. It made the state secondary 
and subordinate to the Church. Cartwright, the 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



147 



great Puritan of Elizabeth's reign, had embodied 
this in the maxim, " No man fashioneth his house 
to his hangings, but his hangings to his house " ; 
and Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was fond 
of repeating the proverb. When he shaped the 
Constitution of that colony in 1638 he made the 
government an humble auxiliary of the churches. 
Cotton found in the Scriptures a complete and 
infallible platform of politics, and of half a dozen 
other things besides. By what picking and snip- 
ping of texts he succeeded in getting whatever was 
desirable from the Bible we may see in his pro- 
posed code, to many of the provisions of which he 
appended Scripture references. That a court of 
law should have a clerk seems clear enough with- 
out a proof text, but Cotton must needs bolster this 
obvious expedient of common sense by citing the 
fact that there was a scribe's chamber in the court 
of the king's house in the time of the prophet 
Jeremiah. 

VI. 

The analogy between monarchy and divinity 
was so strongly felt that one is not surprised to find 
in the last will of Hooker, the founder of Connecti- 
cut, that God is called " His Majestic," and the 
same term occurs in more than one local record of 
the time in England. It was to conciliate this 
dread potentate that blasphemy was suppressed in 
laws and military orders, and the prevailing notion 
of the austere despotism of God had much to do 



Chap. IV. 



Note 4. 



Note 5. 



Abstract of 
Laws, i, 6. 
Jeremiah, 
xxxvi, 10, 



Defense of 

divine 

dignity. 

Conn. 
Rec. , 1,500. 
Royal Hist. 
MSS.Com. 
Reports. 



148 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Note 6. 



Conn. 
Rec, 1640, 
1649, 

MS. 

Records 
Accomac 
Co., Vir- 
ginia. 

Sewall's 
Diary, i, 4. 



with the unrelenting persecution of heretics as his 
sworn foes. This cringing attitude toward a jeal- 
ous God appears in the fine-spun inhibitions of con- 
structive idolatry. The success of difficult enter- 
prises was thought to be secured by the suppres- 
sion of heresy and blasphemy. Captain John 
Smith undertook to abolish swearing even among 
the rude and calamity-smitten Jamestown emi- 
grants ; but he did it not by Puritan severities, but 
in a jolly, rough-and-ready way by pouring cold \ 
water into the sleeve of the swearer. Varying 
penalties were denounced against swearing in New 
England ; the profane man was fined and set in the 
stocks. One Connecticut blasphemer was to have 
his second whipping in the January following his 
first, " except the governor judges the weather un- 
seasonable." In early Virginia records the fines 
for swearing are from one to three shillings, and 
in one case, in 1634, the parson is the prosecutor. 
A Harvard student, who had spoken words regard- 
ing the Holy Ghost which were thought bias- | 
phemous, was publicly solemnly beaten ; the pun- i 
ishment was preceded and followed by prayer, a * 
kind of grace before and after. The student's of- 
fense lay probably in the expression of unorthodox 
opinions, the most atrocious kind of blasphemy. 
He was subjected to other indignities after the 
beating, either to convince him of error or to pro- 
pitiate an offended Deity. It was an accepted the- 
ory with ardent religionists, whether Catholic or 
Protestant, that heretical opinions regarding God 



I 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



149 



should be punished with death. A denial of the 
divinity of Christ was a capital offense under the 
early law of Catholic Maryland, and in later Prot- 
estant Maryland any objection offered to the doc- 
trine of the Trinity was to be punished by boring 
the objector's tongue ; for a second offense the 
Unitarian was branded on the forehead with B for 
blasphemy ; the third time he was to be put to 
silence forever by the last resort of the law. New 
York, in its first year under English authority, 
denounced death against him who should deny 
"the true God and his attributes." Inhumanity 
and injustice were not absent from the colonial 
codes, but the " rights, immunities, and privileges " 
of Almighty God were always guarded. 

VII. 

This apparent excess of reverence has ever a 
basis of self-interest, quite cold-blooded and undis- 
guised. The very buccaneers of that age went to 
prayer and confessed their sins whenever a rich 
prize hove in sight ; and early Virginians sent expe- 
ditions against the Indians with general orders 
which usually began with a prohibition of profanity, 
or some other precaution for securing the favor of 
Heaven. The Virginia Company thought the In- 
dian massacre of 1622 due to the "sins of drunken- 
ness and excess of apparell " in the colony. The 
Massachusetts Company in London wrote to Ende- 
cott, in charge of their pioneer settlement, to 
" make good laws for the punishing of swearers " 



Chap. IV. 



Bacon's 
Laws of 
Md., 1726, 
xvi, i. 



Duke of 
York's 
Laws, so 
called, 
1664. 

Note 7. 



Self-inter- 
est in 
morals. 

Comp. 
Hist, des 
Filibus- 
tiers, pp. 
45, 54, 55- 



Randolph 
MSS. in 
Va. Hist. 
Society. 
Young's 
Chronicles 
of Mass., 
189. Com- 
pare 



150 



The Transit of Civilization. 



and other offenders " if you ever expect a comfort 
or blessing of God upon our plantation." The 
first church was organized in Massachusetts during 
an epidemic, " to pacify the Lord's wrath." Win- 
throp, in his journal, is able to point out the par- 
ticular sin that provoked almost every calamity of 
fire, illness, death, and financial loss that befell any 
individual. One man, for example, ventured to 
work too late on Saturday evening, the beginning 
of the Puritan Sabbath, and his child forthwith fell 
into a cistern on Sunday night and was drowned. 
In the time of King Philip's Indian war the obliter- 
ation of a town by firebrand and tomahawk was 
traced, not to the lack of a blockhouse and a vigi- 
lant garrison, but to the doomed town's neglect to 
secure " an able, faithfull dispenser of the word of 
God." The blight of 1665 that extinguished all 
hope of wealth from the growth of wheat in Massa- 
chusetts was attributed by the common people to 
the execution of the Quaker martyrs, and the In- 
dian wars of 1676 and 1677 were thought a punish- 
ment for persecuting laws. But the conservative 
party proceeded in the latter year to make the 
laws against Quakers more stringent. Archdale, the 
tolerant Quaker Governor of South Carolina, 
thought that a pestilential fever in that colony was 
due to the persecution of dissenters. 

VIII. 

In the seventeenth century there was much 
fear of lapsing into idolatry by inadvertence. Lord 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



151 



Bacon recommends the pouring of wine into newly 
dug earth for the remedial effect of the vapor, but 
he adds the caution "that it be not taken for a 
heathen sacrifice or libation to the earth." The 
clause in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 
1641 which made it a capital offense to have "any 
other god but the Lord God," could have had no 
practical aim unless it was the suppression of con- 
structive idolatry. Many members of the train- 
bands in that colony regarded the English ensign 
as a gross idol, and refused to march behind it, be- 
cause it had a cross in it. Endecott, the New Eng- 
land Jehu, thinking three fourths of a cross no cross 
at all, cut off one arm of it in the Salem colors. 
Hooker wrote a paper to prove the ensign harm- 
less ; but the rising zeal against idolatry obliterated 
the cross of St. George from the colors of the train- 
bands in 1635. After this reformation the red flag 
had only a white field in the upper corner for a 
union. For similar reasons the early Puritan set- 
tlers omitted the prefix " Saint " from familiar geo- 
graphical names. For long generations English- 
men had paid rents and wages on the penulti- 
mate day of September, when the harvest was 
fully in hand. For such purposes it had been the 
habit for ages to count the year from Michaelmas 
to Michaelmas, and the term could hardly be 
spared. In Connecticut it was Protestantized into 
Miheltide, so that neither mass nor archangel 
might get any good of it. In the first half of the 
seventeenth century, and later, there were scruples 



Chap. IV. 



Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
186, 189, 
note, 224, 
225. Mass. 
Records, 
224 and 
elsewhere. 
Stough- 
ton's letter 
in Mass. 
Hist. See. 
Proc, 
1861, 135. 



Sewall's 
Diary, ii, 
12. 

Danker's 
Journal, 
L. I. Hist. 
Soc., 1,393. 



Conn. 
Rec, i, 
182, 1649. 
Comp. 
Ben Jon- 
son's Al- 
chemist, 



152 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 

Win- 
throp's 
Journal 
and others. 



Sewall's 
Diary, 
1696, i, 428. 



Mather's 

Ratio 

Disciplinse. 



Bozman's 
Maryland, 
ii. 403, 404- 



against using the ordinary names of months and 
days of the week on account of their pagan deriva- 
tion. Ordinal numbers were introduced instead to 
avoid etymological idolatry. " In Boston," said the 
royal commissioners of Charles II, "neither days, 
months, seasons, churches, nor inns are known by 
their English names." The practice of numbering 
the days gradually passed out of fashion, after it 
became a badge of Quakerism. Efforts to revive 
it in the last years of the century were vain. The 
pinch of the inconvenient scruple was got over by 
a trick of words : the names of the days were 
purified from idolatry by being called " planetary 
names"; but colonial New England continued to 
refuse to speak of "the Lord's Day" as Sunday. 
Puritan refugees from Protestant persecution in 
Virginia refused to take an oath of fidelity to the 
government of Maryland, because the officers of 
Maryland had sworn not to molest Roman Catho- 
lics, and what was that but swearing to counte- 
nance and uphold Anti-Christ? And so by many 
links, through their oaths to the government and 
Church and through the governors and their 
oaths, and through the unmolested Catholics with 
their saints and images, these tender consciences 
would at last be drawn into a long-distance pa- 
ganism. 

Not only was there danger in those perilous 
times that the individual might fall into damnable 
idolatry without knowing it, but the Puritan gov- 
ernments were ever on the alert to keep the land 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



153 



from being polluted by heathenism. Soon after 
the earliest settlement of Massachusetts, Governor 
Endecott cut down one false god, the maypole at 
Merrymount. A few years later, in 1633, the 
Massachusetts General Court went further and 
prohibited the natives from practicing their an- 
cient custom of powwowing in the land of their 
forefathers. Weird dances, accompanied by gourd 
rattles and punctuated with grunts and inarticulate 
cries, were naturally taken for worship of a false 
god or of a devil. The Virginia Company had 
much earlier proposed to capture the Indian medi- 
cine men and thus put an end to such heathen 
mysteries. The ancient maxim that " dominion 
hath its foundation in grace " was accepted in the 
earliest colonies, and hence Christians dominated 
pagans by right divine. One writer intimates that 
some of the Virginia planters, about the middle of 
the century, carried their Christianity so far as to 
believe that a pagan had no right to property for 
which a Christian might have use. 



IX. . 

The sense of moral proportion was obscured 
and confused in a reverent dread of offending 
God. The prevalent English custom of drinking 
healths was deemed "an abominable practice," 
and put under ban in New England, and later in 
Pennsylvania, not for the promotion of temperance 
alone, but mainly because it was a profane mixing 



Chap. IV. 



Gatford's 
Public 
Good with- 
out Private 
Interest, 

1657. 
Comp. 
Young's 
Chron. of 

Mass., 387. 



Trifling 
offenses 
magnifled. 



Note 8. 



154 



The Transit of Civilization. 



of prayer and drinking and " a vain custom." It 
was also " an occation of the wasting of the good 
creature " at which the Creator might take um- 
brage. In 1643 the Virginia law made the evil of 
" the loathsome sinne of drunkennesse " to consist 
partly " in the abuse of God's good creatures," 
and this pious phrase has left its trace down to 
our time in a cant name for strong drink, " the 
creature." In modern times the objections urged 
against gaming turn upon the supposed danger of 
falling into the vice of gambling. The Puritans 
were at much pains to explain that the chief sin in 
games of chance was one of profanity. The lot 
was " an appeal unto God," and games of chance 
were therefore declared by the Connecticut Gen- 
eral Court to be " altogether unlawful in the very 
nature of them," since in cards and dice " that 
great and sollemne ordinance of a Lott is expressly 
and directly abused and prophaned." Cotton even 
unlimbered his scholastic logic to prove that the 
merry nonsense of choosing mates on Valentine's 
day by drawing papers from a hat was an appeal 
to God's "immediate providence for dispensing 
these ludicra," and hence " a taking God's name in 
vain." To check " the great dishonor of God " 
that was wrought by games, the Massachusetts 
Legislature, in 1670, excluded cards and dice from 
the colony as things pernicious in their very na- 
ture. The observing of Christmas was objection- 
able because it was an occasion for the profanity 
of playing;, games. But Christmas observance 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



was iniquitous on its own account, for all honor- 
ing of times and seasons other than the Sabbath 
seemed to the finespun Puritan mind a masked 
idolatry. It was ordained in Massachusetts, in 
1670, that the mere abstaining from labor on the 
25th of December should be a penal offense. By 
this system of far-fetched deduction innocent acts 
were made technically superstitious, while intoler- 
ance and superstition, with consequent cruelty to 
"heretics" and "witches," walked abroad un- 
abashed in garments of sanctity. 



X. 

When the early English settlements were made 
in America, the observance of a strict Sabbath was 
a newly discovered virtue brought to light in the 
later Reformation period. Never before was a new 
obligation so swiftly and widely accepted as was 
strict Sabbath keeping in England and Scotland. 
Several things had prepared for this acceptance ; 
nothing had done more than the recoil of religious 
people from the coarse and brutal amusements 
that made the English Sunday of Elizabeth's reign 
a school of frivolity and cruelty. From morris 
dancing, from intolerably coarse interludes, and 
from the pitiless baiting of bulls and bears, the 
reaction to severe restraint was natural. Like all 
other novelties of the new century Sabbath keep- 
ing was impatiently exported to be tried in the 
virgin communities of the New World. A severe 



156 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Sabbath was imposed on the infant Virginia col- 
ony in the relentless military code under which 
De la Warr, Gates, Dale, and Argall ruled. Argall, 
though a tyrant, a semi-pirate, and a finished de- 
spoiler of other men's estates, was religious none the 
less ; the combination was not uncommon in that 
time. Under this versatile master of rapine the 
colonists were required to be religious willy nilly. 
He who did not go to church on Sunday must 
" lye neck and heels " — that is, with chin and knees 
drawn close together — " on the corps du gard " the 
following night and be reduced to slavery for a 
week. If this did not take the atheism out of the 
culprit, a harsher penalty was visited on succeeding 
offenses. The sub-colony sent to Virginia in 1619 
by the estimable Smith of Nibley and his asso- 
ciates was provided with instructions which re- 
quired that " vain sports bee refrained " on the 
Lord's Day, which was to be observed with " divine 
exercises according to the common prayer." James 
I had tried to check the tide of Sabbatarianism, 
but his so-called Book of Sports had precisely as 
much effect as the memorable command of his 
remote predecessor Knut against the incoming sea. 
He never learned that great lesson of statesman- 
ship that once Humpty Dumpty is down the king 
himself can not replace him. James tried to com- 
pel Englishmen to amuse themselves on Sunday 
as in former times, but we find this company of 
good churchmen spurning his " vain sports " in 
their general orders, and sending copies of the 



i 



Weights and Measures of Condtict. 



157 



" Practice of Piety " along with the prayer book to 
teach the emigrant subjects of the king an opposite 
doctrine. Bishop Bayly's Practice of Piety was 
much read in^Virgrnia during the seventeenth cen- 
tury, and it gives seventy-five pages of its small 
bulk to enforcing the duty of sanctifying the first 
day of the week. Beside the forbidding of all 
business and burden carrying, it is particularly 
severe on the "trimming, painting, and pamper- 
ing" of one's self on Sunday, which is "doing the 
divel's work vpon God's Day." Bayly also forbids 
" Studying any Bookes of Science but the holy 
Scripture and Divinitie," and " all recreations and 
Sports which at other times are lawful," with " all 
grosse feeding " and " all talking about worldly 
things." This view of duty was enforced by ar- 
raying the very same horrible examples that had 
served in Bownd's famous treatise on the Sabbath. 
Did not the scaffolding fall like the tower in 
Siloam and kill the people at a Sunday bear bait- 
ing in London ? And this not at all on account of 
their inhumanity to the bear, but solely because 
they were enjoying " carnall Sports on the Lord's 
Day." Dr. Bownd's nobleman whose hunting on 
Sunday caused his child to come into the world 
with a dog's face reappears in Bayly. A disas- 
trous conflagration in Stratford-on-Avon and a pe- 
culiar combustibility in other towns with Sunday 
fairs were also edifying examples of the danger of 
obeying King James in this regard. But whatever 
effect such dire examples may have had on the seri- 



158 



The Transit of Civilization. 



ous minds of pious men and women, the great ma- 
jority of early Virginians took their Sundays with- 
out fear of divine judgments and without regard to 
the Sabbath law of the colony passed in 1643. 
Many of them spent the day in gregarious and de- 
moralizing idleness. 

XI. 

Here we come upon those forces that made 
the culture of Virginia as distinctively secular as 
that of New England was dominantly theological. 
There were physical difficulties obstructing reli- 
gious observance in the Chesapeake region, where 
habitations were thinly strung out along the estu- 
aries, rivers, and tributary creeks — mere sinuous 
lines of water side settlement with only forest be- 
hind. There were plantations that had never an 
entrance or exit by land. Some parishes were 
thirty miles and more in shore length, and when 
the web-footed pioneers would attend church they 
must commonly do it by sailing in their sloops or 
by laborious paddling in dugouts. After the pass- 
ing of Hunt and Whittaker and other brave mis- 
sionaries of the first generation there came a dif- 
ferent race of clergymen, " such as wore Black 
Coats, and could babble in a Pulpet, roar in a Tav- 
ern, . . . and rather, by their dissolutenesse, destroy 
then feed their Flocks." The church was far away, 
the parson contemptible, but no doubt some of the 
isolated settlers resorted to service to meet their 
neighbors and relieve the tedium of loneliness. 



Weights and Meastires of Coftduct. 



159 



But many of the younger Virginians, and those of 
the rougher class, generally preferred to spend the 
idle day of the week at the nearest Indian village 
in rude amusements and intercourse with the bar- 
barians. There was a considerable betterment of 
manners in the times of the English Common- 
wealth, when exiled Cavaliers brought in a more 
dignified way of living and a better regulated 
Sunday. Throughout the colonial period the Vir- 
ginia Sunday was never a rigorous Sabbath, but 
mainl}^ a day of leisure, of sport, and of social en- 
joyment, with resort to the Church service when 
convenient. The typical country squire of the 
Chesapeake region treated religion as a mere pro- 
priety, by no means to be taken too seriously ; 
there were many in the eighteenth century who 
rejected it altogether. It came to pass, thus, that 
the Virginia mind was coolly secular and unspecu- 
lative — an intellect trained to affairs, aM above all 
to politics and social intercourse. Virginia's early 
contribution to the intellectual life of the countrj^ 
was naturally a political one. The difference be- 
tween the outcome of colonial Virginia and that of 
colonial New England might almost be anticipated 
by observing the wide difference between the early 
Virginia Sunday and the Puritan Sabbath. New 
England was cradled in religious enthusiasms that 
gave tone to life in the whole northern belt of the 
United States. If Virginia and the States of her 
planting have lacked that reformatory zeal which 
has made New England so generally serviceable. 



Chap. IV. 



i6o 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Note 13. 



The New 

England 
Sabbath. 



Note 14. 



Mass. 
Records, 
1653, vol. 
iii, 316. 



and sometimes so tedious, it is probably because 
Virginia was almost untouched by any strong reli- 
gious sentiment, until it was at length stirred by 
the evangelical movement in the middle of the 
eighteenth century. 

XII. 

Although the keeping of Sunday with sab- 
batical strictness began soon after the Reforma- 
tion in some parts of England, the doctrine made 
no great stir until Dr. Bownd's elaborate work on 
the Sabbath of the Old and New Testament burst 
upon an astonished public in 1595, and by its bold- 
ness brought down upon itself condemnation to the 
flames and the prohibition of further issue. Eccle- 
siastical and governmental interference helped to 
make a painfully rigorous repose on Sunday a dis- 
tinctive badge of Puritanism. The Sabbath in the 
superlative degree crossed the high seas with the 
Puritan migration. In New England it was ar- 
gued that, as the Sabbath was the principal out- 
ward means of honoring God, it stood for the 
whole duty of man toward God. And a right 
divine reverence was paid to it. Contrary to Eng- 
lish custom, the greatest Puritan divines, Cotton 
and Hooker, maintained with consistent literalness 
that the consecrated time began at sunset on Sat- 
urday evening, because the Jewish Sabbath began 
on Friday, and the evening and the morning made 
a day in the first chapter of Genesis. Judaism sat 
hard on the Puritan conscience in many ways; 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



i6i 



even the Jewish preparation for the Sabbath was 
imposed on the people in the first years of New 
England. " All that inhabit the Plantation " were 
ordered, in 1629, to "surcease their labors every 
Saturday throughout the year at three o'clock." 
The rest of the day was given to catechising and 
other painful preparations of the soul for the irk- 
some austerities of the Sabbath. In mediaeval 
times mortifications of the flesh were sometimes 
savagely severe, but they were voluntary and 
affected only the individual inflicting them upon 
himself. Puritan austerities were imposed b}^ 
family authority on servants and little children, 
and enforced with ruthless severity on a whole 
community by the magistrate. On the Sabbath 
cattle might not be pastured in the common field 
where they would have to be watched, food must 
not be prepared, nor must one pay a visit or walk 
in the streets or the fields except to meeting, nor 
might one stay at home from meeting without 
danger of fine or whipping-post. In New Haven, 
and probably elsewhere, indulgence in eating an 
apple or cracking a nut was accounted reprehen- 
sible. In solemn awe of the Sabbath the innocent 
gambols of the children were repressed as some- 
thing particularly heinous. " We should rest from 
labor, much more from play," says Cotton in a 
catechism ludicrously entitled Milk for Babes. 
The aged Increase Mather, as late as 1712, urged 
that children must not be suffered to play on the 
LfOrd's Day. Of rest the Puritan mind had no 



Chap. IV. 



Instruc- 
tions to 
Endecott 
in Young's 
Chron. 
Mass., 163, 
with note 
and author- 
ities there 
cited. 



Lambert's 
New 
Haven, 
1S8 and 
elsewhere. 



Milk for 
Babes, in 
Prince 
Library, 
Boston. 

Mather's 
Medita- 
tions on 
the Sancti- 
fication of 
the Lord's 
Day. 



1 62 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Cal. Col. 
Papers, 
State Paper 
Office, 
i66o-'68, 
No. 51. 



Lambert's 
New 
Haven, 
193, note. 



conception ; it was a technical term that included 
the attending to public prayers, stretching some- 
times to a full hour in length, and to sermons of 
yet greater prolixity, interspersed with home exer- 
cises to fill up the time and banish repose. The 
leaders were generally sincere enthusiasts bent on 
pleasing God and not even comprehending what a 
huge burden of unbearable Pharisaism they were 
binding on the backs of men. Probably nothing 
else in Puritanism, not even its hatred of here- 
tics and its horror of witches, caused so much 
human unhappiness in the aggregate as did its 
effort to transform the Christian Sunday into a 
punctilious Hebrew Sabbath. For the attainment 
of this end almost every sort of outrage on per- 
sonal liberty was perpetrated by the magistrates 
and by domestic authority. Even foreigners pre- 
sumably ignorant of the law were liable to arrest 
and other indignities, if caught strolling in the 
streets of Boston on Saturday evening after sun- 
set. Ambassadors from a French Catholic colony 
were shut into Winthrop's house the entire Sun- 
day for fear of collision with public opinion and 
the constables. This polite incarceration was miti- 
gated by " the liberty of a private walk in the gar- 
den." In New Haven, in 1647, a young man was 
sent to the whipping-post on Monday for not go- 
ing to meeting on Sunday, and two brothers were 
beaten by their father for visiting young women 
on Saturday after sunset. They lived unmarried 
to their deaths from mortification. Much of the 



Weights and Measures of Cojidtict. 



163 



torture proceeding from the Puritan Sabbath was 
self-inflicted. There is a pitiful story of Wiggles- 
worth, the author of the popular Day of Doom, 
sitting long on a windy Sunday in an agony of 
scrupulous uncertainty, unable to decide whether 
he might with a good conscience venture to go 
and shut a neighbor's swinging stable door and so 
save it from wreck. He ended by leaving the 
door to its fate for the Lord's sake. 

The yoke of bondage enforced by law galled 
the necks of those who were less religious or who 
held to the easier habits of the Church of England. 
There were many in the first generation who " ac- 
counted it their happiness to live in the wast howl- 
ing wilderness " to escape this unblinking supervi- 
sion, giving up many advantages to preserve that 
liberty so dear to men not broken by oppression. 
Later in the century there was a party that denied 
the right of the colonial government to enforce the 
Sabbath and prescribe modes of worship. An elec- 
tion sermon was leveled at this uprising, and the 
Synod of 1679 even shakes at it the old superstition 
used by Dr. Bownd in 1595, and later in the Practice 
of Piety, that conflagrations are intimately con- 
nected with lax Sabbath observance. And indeed 
the New England Sabbath, though almost too 
much for flesh and blood, had by this time become 
a fixed tradition, good for yet more than a hundred 
years of survival before it should begin to show 
signs of decline. In 1740 we find it still the custom 
to shut the gates of the Boston peninsula and to put 



Chap. IV. 



Sibley's 
Harvaijd 
Graduates, 
i, 268, ,'269. 



/ 



Chaun- 
cey's Com- 
mencement 
Sermon, 
Cam- 
bridge, 
1655. 



James 

Allen's 

Election 

Sermon, 

1679. 

Results of 

Three 

Synods, 

100. 



Note 15. 



164 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 

Bennett 
MS. in 
Mass. Hist. 
Soc. Proc, 
1861, 115. 



Sunday in 
Maryland. 

Md. 

Archives, i, 
83, 1639. 



a guard at the ferry, that no one might go forth on 
Sunday. And the traveler who gives us this ac- 
count of the state of siege in which Boston put 
itself once a week adds that if " they could escape 
out of the town, it wouldn't answer their end ; for 
the same care is taken, all the country over, to pre- 
vent travelling on Sundays . . . They will not suf- 
fer any one to walk down to the water side, though 
some of the houses are adjoining to the several 
wharfs, nor even in the hottest days of summer 
will they admit any one to take the air on the Com- 
mon. . . . The justices, attended with a posse of 
constables, go about every week to compel obedi- 
ence to this law." Even a group of two or three 
might not talk together in the street on Sunday. 
Thus uneasily with wearisome diligence ?nd infi- 
nite watchfulness did the New England metropolis 
take its rest. There is a reverse to this picture of 
strait-laced government that is more agreeable. 
The traveler just quoted tells us "it is a rare thing 
to meet with any drunken people, or to hear an 
oath sworn, in their streets." 



XIII. 

In Maryland the early law regarding Sunday 
was Catholic in tone ; work was forbidden on " the 
Lord's Day or other holy days." This modest 
prohibition may have been tolerably well observed, 
for the roistering settlers were ready enough to 
abstain from work on any day of the week when 



Weights a7id Measures of Conduct. 



165 



excitement could be found. But the law probably 
bound them little ; certainly they freely disre- 
garded the act passed at the same time against 
" drinking to a notable perturbation of any organ 
of sense or motion." There were pious Catholics 
who spent their Sundays becomingly, no doubt, 
and there were many Puritans in Maryland whose 
Sabbaths were characteristically strict. 

In the Dutch colony of New Netherlands many 
laws were made regulating the sale of liquor on 
Sunday, and in 1663 a bill was passed in favor of a 
strict Sabbath, but against this New Amsterdam 
protested, and refused to proclaim the law, as con- 
trary to the freedoms of Holland. It would have 
been impossible to enforce a strict Sabbath on the 
mixed population of residents and the yet more 
varied comers and goers in New Amsterdam. The 
Dutch, says Sir George Mackenzie, have " few 
Merchants and Tradesmen who do not sell and 
work freely on the Sunday." 



XIV. 

Religious zeal was abundant in the seventeenth 
century among devout people of all creeds, but it 
lacked that touch of generous pity that in more 
recent times would fain convert men for their own 
benefit. It was a zeal for church, for party, for fac- 
tion — a zeal for sound doctrine as each sect under- 
stood sound doctrine. There was a disinterested 
zeal for the glory of God, or, as the devoted Catho- 



Chap. IV. 



Note 16. 



In the 
Dutch 
colony. 



Dutch 

Manu- 
scripts, vol. 
X, pt. iii, 
119. 

O'Calla- 
ghan's 
Laws of 
N. N.,448. 
Moral Hist, 
of Frugal- 
ity, i6go, 
p. 20. 



Zeal with- 
out pity. 



1 66 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



lie missionaries of Maryland phrased it, " for the 
g-lory of the Blood of our Redeemer." But men of 
all shades of opinion took pleasure in the disasters of 
obstinate opponents and unbelievers. Roger Clap 
does not conceal the pleasure it gives him that one 
of the gainsayers of the Massachusetts theocracy 
had probably been roasted alive by the Indians ; and 
the same religious but ruthless spirit crops out in 
all churches and parties of the time in England and 
America. It was not Laud, but his predecessor and 
opponent, Archbishop Abbot, who took pains to 
secure the burning of two heretics by packing the 
court with judges already pledged to decide against 
the accused. The undertone of philanthropy that 
we confidently expect to find in religious feeling in 
recent times was lacking in the fiercer and, if we 
must say so, more religious spirit of that day. 



XV. 

In order better to mark the distinction between 
that age and this later time, let us digress to trace, 
along: one of several more or less obscure lines of 
cause and effect, the evolution of altruistic zeal. 
When that tide of frivolity and scoffing profligacy 
that overflowed English life at the fall of the Com- 
monwealth and the return of Charles II to the 
throne had swelled to the full, there sprang up in 
some London parishes, about 1679, "religious so- 
cieties." By whose agency the first were planted,] 
or whence came the seed-thought, we shall prob- 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



167 



ably never know. Intended only to promote de- 
voutness of spirit and seriousness of life in indi- 
viduals, these little groups of brethren pledged to 
one another, and, solemnly taking the communion 
together in their own parishes, offered a warm and 
sheltered soil in which germinated those ideas that 
formed the religious life of the eighteenth century. 
By a gradual modification some of these associa- 
tions appeared in 1691 as the famous societies for 
the reformation of manners by appeal to the law. 
Their most effective work was done in Queen 
Anne's time. This tendency to do by means of 
societies what the half-palsied English Church of 
that time could not do, resulted in 1699 and the 
following years in the establishment of societies for 
religious propagandism — both by printed publica- 
tions and the sending of missionaries — a device by 
which Protestantism has sought to supply the loss 
of the mediseval religious orders. The outgrowth 
of the devout societies did not weaken their organi- 
zations. One of these nurseries of pietism at a 
much later time bore the nickname of the Holy 
Club of Oxford, and out of it issued the Wesley- 
Whitefield revival — a revival that primarily sought 
not to build up any Church or sect, but to benefit 
the brutal and neglected by means of religious in- 
fluences. Thus a zeal for pity's sake took the place 
of the old stern and pitiless passion for what was 
thought to promote the glory of God. White-hot 
agitations that assume wide proportions are gradu- 
ally changed by the resistance they encounter, and 



Chap. IV. 

Religious 
Societies, 
3d ed., 
1 701. 



A Short 

Acct. of 

Several 

Kinds of 

Societies, 

1700. 

White- 

Kennett 

Library, 

London. 

Acct. of 
Founda- 
tion of Soc. 
for Prop. 
Gospel, 
Appx. to 
the sermon 
of 1706. 



i68 



The Transit of Civilization. 



are modified by cross-forces, until their momentum 
spends itself in achieving what the first promoters 
did not have in mind. Religious movements in 
this way become at length political and social 
forces. The " Great Awakening " in the eight- 
eenth century was presently metamorphosed, in 
part, at least, into philanthropic and reformatory 
agitations. The wish to save men's souls became 
an aspiration to deliver them from oppression, to 
educate them, and free them from the hardships 
of poverty. This outcome of the religious move- 
ment coincided with the philosophical and political 
tendency toward democracy, that played so con- 
spicuous a part in the transformation of ideas that 
took place in the wonderful eighteenth century. 



XVI. 

We shall not understand the age of colonization j 
unless we look into its schemes of salvation which] 
are in some sort an index of moral stress. Bishop 
Bayly's now forgotten Practice of Piety, " Direct- 
ing a Christian how to walke that he may please J 
God," shall inform us, as it instructed nearly all 
men in that time. Its teaching regarding the Sab- 
bath we have already noted. Editions of this] 
guide to godliness tumbled headlong from the 
press in a succession so rapid that the booksellers! 
of the time became confused in attempting to num- 
ber them. A minister complained in 1656 that the 
" generality of the Plebeians " held its authority to 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



169 



be " equal with that of the Scripture." Bunyan's 
watchdog conscience was awakened by it and Ben 
Jonson's mocking humor laughs at the veneration 
for it. Colonists frequently carried it to Virginia 
and elsewhere, sometimes in company with the 
Bible, the prayer book, and Barrough's Method of 
Phisicke, and throughout the seventeenth century it 
turns up frequently among heirlooms left to descend- 
ants by deceased planters, and in New England it 
v/as even translated into the Indian tongue by the 
apostle Eliot. A Virginian of the early period, 
while wrestling with the unsubdued wilderness for 
bread and meat, and trying to decide whether or 
not his malarial fever was to be treated as an " in- 
termitting tertian " or " a continuing quotidian," or 
whether it was both of these combined according 
to the systematic Barrough, must also pick out in 
the intervals of business and the pauses between 
ague fits the proper way of saving his soul. The 
Practice of Piety explained it in such a fashion that 
no wayfaring man, be he ever so wise, could by 
any chance understand it. It was also complicated 
by a folding diagram. In order to please God the 
plain man must know " the essence of God in re- 
spect of the divers manner of being therein," and 
also the " attributes which are either Nominall or 
Real." That is to say, he must appreciate the " ab- 
soluteness," " simpleness," and " infiniteness " of Di- 
vine existence, and then must know five " relative 
attributes " besides. If the acclimating fever has not 
haply carried him ofif while he is mastering these 



Chap. IV. 



Jonson's 
Gypsies, 
quoted in 
Int. to^ 
Braith- 
waite's 
Barnaby, 
1818, p. 77. 



Edition 
" Printed 
at Delft- 
haven for 
the good of 
Great 
Briteiin." 



I/O 



The Transit of Civilization. 



complexities and perplexities, he finds that he must 
likewise " competently know and necessarily be- 
leeve " other scholastic propositions, finespun to 
invisibility all of them, regarding the nature of 
God. He is also required to know himself — not 
himself actually, but only himself as John Doe in 
certain theological relations and in a wholly imper- 
sonal way. Having now glorified God by knowing 
him analytically, he comes to the second branch, 
which is to glorify God by serving him. One 
looks for a treatise on moral duties, but we are in 
the seventeenth century. This service of God be- 
gins and ends in acts of devotion performed " pri- 
vately," " domestically," and " publicly," with re- 
membrance of feasts and a yet more scrupulous ob- 
servance of fasts. Religious etiquette all ! For 
closing so futile a life there are directions for dying 
with proper devoutness. Duties to one's fellows, 
such as fill the Sermon on the Mount, find no place 
in the outspread diagram of duties with which the 
book begins, and it is with difficulty that they find 
standing room in a few subsidiary parts of the 
work. The mediaeval virtue of almsgiving, with 
an eye to the welfare of the giver in the next 
world, appears in traditional form with a Protestant 
tag to it : " Liberalitie in alms-deeds is our surest 
foundation that we shall obtaine in eternall life a 
liberall reward through the Mercie and Merits of 
Christ." It was with this end in view no doubt 
that well-to-do Virginians kept up a custom of 
leaving exactly ten pounds to the poor of the par- 



I 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



171 



ish, and this was the only bequest that was in 
every case described not in colonial currency or 
tobacco, but in sterling money. If we inquire into 
the reason for the marvelous popularity of Bishop 
Bayly's Practice of Piety we shall find it in the 
fact that the book was the fullest expression of the 
religious sentiment of the people in an age of 
transition, ft was, besides, written with consider- 
able vigor. So much was it esteemed in England 
that in some instances at least it was read aloud by 
those who watched witches as a counter sorcery to 
confound the devil. A change in the sense of 
moral proportion, the waning of a belief in diabol- 
ism, with a growing notion that the heavens are 
not wholly unpropitious even to men who do not 
understand all about divine existence and attri- 
butes, and keep fasts, have caused this once utterly 
popular book to fall into a fathomless oblivion. 
When with difficulty, after tedious searching of 
public libraries, one finds by good luck a copy of 
the Practice of Piety that has escaped the waste- 
basket, it is worn and torn by seventeenth century 
thumbing, 

XVII. 

" We han't glorified God as God," laments the 
preacher of the Massachusetts Election Sermon in 
1704. In the effort to please an austere God wholly 
intent on securing his own glory, the age lost in 
some measure what it could ill spare, the propul- 
sion of religious sentiment in the putting forward 



Chap. IV. 



Gentle- 
man's 
Magazine, 
1830, p. 26. 



"Effect- 
ual Call- 
ing." 



1/2 



The Transit of Civilization. 



of civilization and the uplifting of the individual. 
Puritan writers made holiness merely relative, the 
result of a mysterious transaction between God and 
the soul, in which transaction the soul had little 
part. This holiness, according to Cotton, was so 
persistent that it might survive much base living. 
He instances Solomon. On the other hand, up- 
rightness of life, not preceded by " effectual call- 
ing," was mere sin. Wigglesworth in his Day of 
Doom marshals at the bar of God a company of 

. . . civil honest men, 
That loved true Deahng and hated Stealing, 
Ne'er wronged their Brethren. 

But these worthy men, whose like is none too 
common, are summoned only to be scorned and 
damned. " The Ninevites and Sodomites," they 
are told, had no such sin as theirs. " Their right- 
eousness is sin," the Judge tells them, " whereas the 
same deserveth Shame and meriteth Damnation." 
Thus the ideal of morality itself is abrogated in 
order to " glorify God as God " in the damnation 
of civil honest men. Fortunately for the world, 
theories that controvert fundamental intuitions are 
likely to be only speculatively believed. Neither 
Cotton nor Wigglesworth could have been as bad 
as his theory ; in practice they probably respected 
honest men and detested scoundrels regardless of 
theological considerations. But such speculations 
when they reached weaker natures would serve as 
pretexts for immorality. 



Weights and Measures of Co?iduct. 



173 



XVIII, 

" Take heed," wrote Herbert of Cherbury to a 
friend, in 161 7, "of superstition and blasphemy, 
and above all that you make not a worse God 
than yourself." In these words he touched the 
weakness of the age : moral judgments were off 
their center when men adored a God worse than 
the worshipers. It seems like a paradox, yet it 
is true, that the more intensely religious a people 
were in that time the worse was their representa- 
tion of the Deity. The great and long-continued 
popularity of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom in 
New England makes it good evidence in this case. 
His damnation scene is medisevally horrible : 

They cry, they roar, for anguish sore 
and gnash their Tongues for horror : 

But get away without delay, 
Christ pities not your cry. 

Depart to Hell, there you may yell 
and roar eternally. 

There are passages more ghastly than this, but 
why disfigure white paper with them ? God is 
made the direct ruthless agent of physical torture 
everlasting, kept up for no conceivable end but his 
own glory. ..." God's direful wrath, their bodies 
hath forever immortal made . . . And live they 
must while God is just, that he may Plague them 
so." A popular versifier like Wigglesworth, and 
he bred up among pioneers and Puritans, may be 
thought to hold views more extreme than those of 
his age. But Archdeacon Hakewill, much esteemed 



Chap. IV. 



The God 
of that 
age. 



1/4 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



for learning and philosophy, could write the same 
thing with more dignity of expression : " Our fire 
hath neede to be fed continually with wood and 
fewell. . . . that burneth eternally without feed 
. . . for that the breath of the Lords owne mouth 
doth blow and nourish it." The monarchical idea 
dominates the thought of the time. Hakewill does 
not shrink from comparing the ingeniously cruel 
torments which vengeful kings had inflicted on 
their foes to God's punishment of sinners, and says 
that "so terrible is the judge to his enemies that 
he hath devised a wonderful way how to torment 
them," and that his " invention that way is as farre 
beyond the reach of all mortall wits as his power." 
Words of piety these, rank blasphemy none the 
less. 

XIX, 

Irresponsible infants were condemned to perdi- 
tion by the ruthlessly systematic theology of the 
seventeenth century, and this also for the glory of 
the God who made them. The mediaeval churchly 
doctrine that none could be saved without the sac- 
rament of baptism had carried with it the harsh 
corollary that many infants were damned, some of 
them lost through mere accident or inadvertence. 
Cranmer's Catechism of 1548 declares that the chil- 
dren of heathen parents will be "damned everlast- 
ingly " for want of baptism, and in this he follows 
the Lutherans of the same period. In the next cen- 
tury Archbishop Laud, while affirming that baptism 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



175 



is necessary to salvation, declines to bind God to 
the sacrament, probably from his habitual dislike 
of constitutional limitations to sovereign power. 
But the popular belief remained, after the Reforma- 
tion as before, that a child dying- unbaptized was 
doomed. In the dark ages of Virginia and Mary- 
land the parishes were very long-suffering in their 
dealings with tavern-haunting, brawling, and some- 
times almost criminal parsons, apparently from fear 
of having their children grow up nameless heathens 
or die heirs of perdition for want of baptism. North 
Carolina had few clergymen even in the eighteenth 
century, and one finds the settlers plodding many 
rough miles, each with his covey of offspring, to 
intercept a wayfaring parson at some wayside 
spring and thus secure a chance of salvation for 
the young natives. Governor Eden of that colony 
wrote to the Propagation Society lamenting espe- 
cially that " above fourscore " infants had perished 
unbaptized in the massacre by the Tuscaroras in 
17 12. This view of the massacre is rendered more 
picturesque when we remember that Eden was the 
governor who sheltered Blackbeard the pirate, and 
almost certainly shared his plunder. 



XX. 

The Church of England divines feared that 
unbaptized infants might be damned because of 
some one else's fault, but the Calvinistic portion 
of the reliofious world was certain of the damna- 



Chap. IV. 

Laud's 
Confer- 
ence with 
Fisher, ed. 
1673, p. 36. 



Byrd's 
Dividing 
Line, 1728, 
passim. 



Damna- 
tion of 
non-elect 
infants. 



176 



The Transit of Civilization. 



tion of non-elect infants, baptized or unbaptized. 
Even John Robinson, of Leyden, the sweet-hearted 
pastor of the Pilgrims, could not escape this hor- 
rible conclusion, though he seems to accept it with 
a sore heart and averted face. It was the misery 
of religion in that day that good men worshiped a 
God less just and merciful than themselves. As 
late as 1690 "the ministers of the Gospel in Bos- 
ton " published a defense of infant damnation in 
reply to a Quaker who disliked the doctrine. The 
Boston ministers did not, as the Anglicans did, 
leave a narrow fringe of uncertainty. They 
averred, as others of their school of thought had 
done long before, that an obscure phrase in St. 
Paul's most obscure epistle rendered it certain that 
some infants had already been damned for eating* 
the forbidden fruit by proxy before they were 
born. On the other hand, Wigglesworth, the dog- 
gerel Dante of pioneer New England, reserved the 
damnation of unlucky babes to make an effective 
scene at the day of doom. The widespread circu- 
lation of his verses must have sown broadcast no- 
tions out of which every bereaved mother could 
build a tabernacle of perdition for her desolate 
soul. Minds so simply serious failed to see the 
bouffe grotesqueness of the speeches put into the 
mouth of the Divine Judge, whom Wigglesworth 
makes a little lower than a pettifogging country 
justice. The foredoomed infants argue their case 
rather cleverly, and, from a modern point of view, 
they get the best of it. But Christ, the Judge, has 



Weights mid Measures of Conduct. 



177 



the last word, and when they remind him that while 
Adam is saved they are damned for Adam's sin — 

Then answered the Judge most dread, 

God doth such doom forbid, 
That men should die Eternally 

for what they never did ; 
But what you call Old Adam's Fall 

and only his Trespass, 
You call amiss to call it his, 

both his and yours it was. 

This is followed by a disquisition on original 
sin, delivered by the Judge for the edification of 
the lost infants or to clear the minds of the assem- 
bled universe. The infants are assured that they 
are sinners, and can expect only a sinner's share, 
" for I do save none but mine own elect." The 
colloquy, evidently growing embarrassing, is cut 
short by a verdict which reverts to the Judge's 
only reliance — the sin of Adam : 

A crime it is, therefore in bliss 

you may not hope to dwell : 
But unto you I shall allow 

the easiest room in hell. 



XXI. 

Beautiful and merciful lives have blossomed 
and borne fruit under the shadow of harsh and 
repulsive beliefs. It would be easy to fall into the 
error of exaggerating the evil effects of creeds of 
iron. At a certain stage of social development the 
severity of a dominant creed sometimes serves a 
useful purpose of repression where repression is 
needed. The seventeenth century had inherited 



Chap. IV. 



Note 25. 



Strophe 
165. 



Strophe 
181. 

Note 26. 



Harsh 
devotion. 



1/8 



The Transit of Civilization. 



most of its harsh doctrines in some shape from the 
schoolmen or the Church fathers, and it set itself to 
forge them into formal creeds for its own enthrall- 
ment. The welding of doctrines into elaborate and 
systematic confessions and the writing of concise 
expressions of the quintessence of dogmatic theol- 
ogy in innumerable catechisms were regarded as 
a sort of heavenly vocation. Antique doctrines 
tinged with the barbarism of older ages, when thus 
formall}^ propounded and authoritatively imposed, 
served to blur the ideal of even-handed justice and 
arrest the growth of humane sentiments. The 
gentler side of Scripture teaching was more or less 
obscured in an age when master teachers insisted 
on giving a perpetual divine authority to the stern- 
est laws of the early Hebrews. It was an age that 
embittered its devotions by singing unsoftened the 
imprecatory psalms. It was a matter of obliga- 
tion to sing all the psalms, even such vindictive 
verses as these in the New England Bay Psalm 
Book of 1640 : 

And let the prayer that he doth make 
be turned into sinne ; 

His children let be fatherless 

and's wife a widow make. 
Let's children still be vagabonds, 

begge they their bread also ; 
Out of their places desolate 

let them a seeking go. 

The primitive ferocity of such prayers is not 
chargeable to Puritanism ; the versifiers of the 
Bay Psalm Book had heard the Sternhold and 



Weights ayid Measures of Condtict. 



179 



Hopkins version sung in English churches from 
infancy, and had probably used it for their primary 
reading book in school. It had accustomed them 
to such lines as these : 



Yea blessed shall that man be cald 

that takes thy children yong 
To dash their bones against hard stones 

that lye the streets among. 

Thus sang the Virginia and the Maryland 
churchmen, and thus also the New York and 
Carolina churchmen. The metrical version made 
by the poet George Sandys, once Secretary of the 
Virginia Colony, was far more elegant and was 
" set to new tunes for private devotion." But 
even Sandys will have the Christian in his closet 
pronounce a blessing on the men 

That dash thy children's brains against the stones 
And without pity hear their dying groans. 

This non-Christian commingling of revenge 
and religion gave force to the hatred for heretics 
and embittered persecution and religious contests. 
Hear the bitter words of Ward, a New England 
minister, against the Irish rebels : " Cursed be he 
that holdeth back his sword from blood, yea cursed 
be he that maketh not his sword starke drunk with 
Irish blood," and so on breathlessly to the end. 
These words of Nathaniel Ward were printed in 
London in 1647; two years later Cromwell trans- 
lated them into ghastly fact by the pitiless slaugh- 
ters of Drogheda and Wexford. 



Chap. IV. 



i8o 



The Transit of Civilization. 



XXII. 

The dash of fanaticism in the religion of the 
time and the narrow and literal adherence to the 
precedents found in the most ancient Hebrew- 
Scriptures had something to do with the lack of 
humaneness in the law and its administration. For 
this reason ecclesiastics of all schools were often 
more ruthless than laymen ; they carried their piti- 
less severity up to the credit of their piety. Mas- 
sachusetts clergymen protested in 1635 against 
Winthrop for a leniency that to the modern man 
seems severe. In the controversy with the Gor- 
tonists the Massachusetts clergy advised that men 
not properly subject to the colony should be 
hanged for constructive blasphemy, but the magis- 
trates were wiser or less zealous. The clerical pro- 
fession, by its very nature, is more dominated by 
ideal considerations than others, and the severity 
of clergymen in governmental affairs is not neces- 
sarily from harshness of spirit, but rather from de- 
votion to an ideal of conduct. The pressure of 
religious feeling in former ages was often distinctly 
opposed to the sentiment of humanity. But the 
seventeenth century needed no religious persuasion 
to severity ; it was not at all a humane age. Traces 
of mediaeval barbarism are found in the laws, in the 
customs, and in the brutal sports of the people, as 
well as in the sermons and other ecclesiastical de- 
liverances. For generations the thoughtless popu- 
lace had taken a savage delight in seeing bulls and 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



i8i 



bears baited to the death with fierce dogs ; in an 
exceptional case a horse was turned over to be torn 
by mastiffs for the delight of the people. Bear 
baiting was the favorite way of spending the Sun- 
day afternoon in Elizabeth's reign. One finds in a 
view of London in 1574 two buildings on the Bank- 
side, " The Bowll Baytinge " and " The Bear Bayt- 
inge," carefully indicated as places of chief interest. 
After the scaffolding fell with fatal results at the 
bear baiting on Sunday in 1583 the people became 
superstitiously afraid of such sports on Sunday, but 
they were enjoyed on week days without suspicion 
of wrongdoing. Some of the later Puritans argued 
that as the animosity of animals to one another was 
the result of man's sin, men ought not to make 
sport out of it. The suffering of the animal is 
rarely alluded to in these debates ; theology did 
not care for bulls and bears. Cockfighting had 
been for ages a reputable sport, highly praised by 
such men as Ascham, the tender-hearted school 
reformer, and it was practiced (annually or oftener) 
in schoolrooms apparently as a part of education. 
Against this also some later Puritans protested. 
As late as 1737 an English traveler says that Conti- 
nental people were accustomed to complain of the 
cruelty of " the sports of our vulgar " — the very 
charge Anglo-Saxons are wont to make against the 
Spaniards to-day. Bull baiting and the tormenting 
of tame bears were not imported to America ; bulls 
were too scarce and valuable, and bears were too 
plentiful and fierce. But the relish for inhumane 



Chap. IV. 



Beschrei- 
bung und 
Contre- 
facture der 
Vornehm- 
ster Statt 
der Welte, 
1574- 

Compare 
the opinion 
of Mr. 
Perkins 
and Mr. 
Bolton . . . 
concern- 
ing .. . 
cockfight- 
ing, 1660. 
Harl. 
Miscell., 
vol. vi, 122. 

Note 29. 



Note 30. 



Ib2 



The Transit of Civilization. 



sports remained. Entrapped wolves were made to 
sell their lives in a bloody fray with mastiffs, or 
were tied to the tail of a wild horse to be kicked 
and dragged to death. Josselyn speaks of some 
large New England bird, which he calls a " cor- 
morant," as making rare sport when wounded and 
turned loose to be badgered by dogs. Animals ap- 
pear to have been preferably put to death by dogs. 
One finds Archbishop Sandys in Elizabeth's time 
trying to recover a "brinded dog," and complain- 
ing that he had never a dog with which to kill 
some bucks that had lately been given him. Puri- 
tanism was reformatory, though it could never go 
far beyond its age, and did not break the tether by 
which the great Cartwright in the sixteenth cen- 
tury had tied it to the temporal laws of the Jews. 
Massachusetts had gone to the limit by its credit- 
able and ungrammatical law of 1641 against "Cru- 
eltie to any bruite creature which are usuallie kept 
for man's use." The wild creatures were left with- 
out the pale for want of Mosaic precedent, no 
doubt. In Virginia and Maryland cockfighting 
was a gentlemanly and Christian amusement! 
throughout the colonial time. The laws of the 
Puritan colonies show that the reformatory spirit 
in Puritanism had begun to soften a little the harsh 
cruelty of law and its administration at the time, 
but notwithstanding prohibitions against cruel and 
unusual punishments, burning to death took place! 
in Boston and Cambridge and pressing to death j 
was resorted to in the witchcraft trials in Salem. 



Weights and Measures of Cojidicct. 



183 



Punishments more barbarous, if possible, were in- 
flicted in other colonies. Legal torture to produce 
confession was in use in New Netherlands under 
Dutch rule. In Pennsylvania a gradual translation 
of Quaker theories of non-resistance into milder 
laws took place, and the administration of the law 
was less severe than the law. 



XXIII. 

The obligation of worship, as we have seen, 
was thought to be infinitely greater than moral 
duty. " The languishing and improsperous con- 
dition " of the Virginians after the Restoration 
was not attributed to the strangling of their com- 
merce by the enforcement of the Navigation Act, 
but to the neglect of the people, mainly on account 
of physical impediments, to render to God with 
regularity " that publicke Worship and Service 
which is a Homage due to his great name." For 
this " sacriledge " the people were believed to be 
under a curse. In 1677 the Bishop of London 
took Virginia in hand and set about reforming a 
colony that by all accounts needed attention. He 
proposed that the thinly settled planters should be 
compelled to renounce the "profane custom of 
burying in their gardens and orchards," and forced 
to give up their habit of accepting such marriage 
as they could get from men not ordained, in a land 
where men in orders were exceedingly fcAv, often 

dissolute, and frequently so far away as to be 
13 



Chap. IV. 



Obligation 
of wor- 
ship. 



Virginia's 
Cure, 1662, 
p. 4- 
Force, iii. 



Cal. Col. 
Pprs., Nos. 

337-339- 

Comp. 

123. 



1 84 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV, 



Comp. 

Gatford's 

Public 

Good 

without 

Private 

Int., 1657. 

Morgan 

Godwyn's 

Negro's 

and 

Indian's 

Advocate, 

1680 and 

many 

others. 

Hugh 
Jones, 
Present 
State of 
Va., 1724, 
pp. 68, 69. 



MS. Rec- 
ords York 
Co., Va., 
p. 61, Va. 
State 
Library. 



reached only by a tedious sloop voyage, down one 
river and up another. There were things in the 
colony infinitely worse than the Virginia grave- 
yard at the back of the garden to preserve it from 
prowling wolves, and the conservation of social 
order by marriage at the hands of clerks and lay 
readers, failing a better. But to Bishop Compton, 
as to others in that antique world, ecclesiastical 
impropriety, even when well-nigh unavoidable, was 
a sin more heinous than the oppression of bonds- 
men and unregulated morals. 

Virginia had been settled when no hard-and- 
fast line had yet been drawn between Puritan and 
non-Puritan churchmen, and its church cherished 
both, retaining down to the Revolution the party- 
color of the transition period in which it was 
planted. Its clergy wore no surplices for more 
than a hundred years after the settlement, and in 
some parishes the eucharist was taken in a sitting 
posture. In New England the sacraments Averc 
hard to come by ; in some parts of Virginia they 
could not be refused. One Virginian, in 1645, was 
threatened for refusing to go to communion in his 
parish church and required to bring to the next 
session of the court a certificate that he had re- 
formed in this particular. In New England the 
baptism of babes was not always to be had for the 
asking ; Virginians who declined baptism for their 
children were sometimes dealt with. 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



185 



XXIV. 

In the Puritan attempt to reconstruct the 
Church on a scriptural model, all sorts of scru- 
ples had an opportunity to crystallize. The coup- 
ling of pastors and teachers in Paul's writings was 
a source of trouble and debate. The notion that 
the pastoral office was dual appeared in the fer- 
ments among the excited English Protestants at 
Frankfort before the accession of Elizabeth, it was 
a trait of the Dutch church life in the seventeenth 
century, and it was elaborated among the English 
Separatists before 1582. In New England each 
church undertook to sustain two ministers in the 
hard conditions of pioneer life where the burden 
of one might have been thought too much. A 
ruling elder and several deacons shared authority 
with the "pastor" and the "teacher"; to com- 
plete the hierarchy, " ancient widows " were con- 
cluded to be church officers from their position 
in the Pauline epistles. This system in five tiers, 
originally separatist, was brought to America, in 
theor}^ at least, by the Pilgrims, and, after discus- 
sion, came to be adopted by most of the Massa- 
chusetts churches. No plan could well have suit- 
ed less with frontier conditions. The support of 
two ministers was an irksome financial burden ; a 
double leadership promoted factions ; ministers in 
the second generation were scarce ; and the dual 
system, unsuited to the environment, went into 
swift obsolescence in spite of the lament of ideal- 



Chap. IV. 



Eccen- 
tricities of 
Church 
govern- 
ment. 



Note 31. 



i86 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 

Win- 
throp's 
Journal, 
vol. i, 38, 
note. 

Note 32. 



Scruples 
about 
psalm 
singing. 

Cotton's 
Singing of 
Psalms a 
Gospel 
Ordinance. 
Compare 
Gospel 
Musick or 
the singing 
of David's 
Psalms, 
1644, with 
Preface to 
Newr Eng- 
land Psalm 
Book and 
Wm. 
Ames's A 
Sound out 
of Zion 
and others. 



Barclay's 
Inner Life, 
106. 



ists and the futile efforts of the Synod of 1679 to 
restore the double pastorate of the founders. The 
unnecessary ruling elder went out more gradually, 
and the proposed ecclesiastical widows were found 
impossible from the first, in a new country where 
every woman not decrepit was sure to be ^sought 
in marriage. 

XXV. 

John Cotton says Satan has " mightily bestirred 
himself " in suggesting doubts about psalm sing- 
ing. It was a question whether psalm singing was 
to be allowed at all. It was held that Scripture 
psalms were not to be sung, but only songs " in- 
dited by some personall spirituall gift of some offi- 
cer or member of the church." Then there were 
other scruple-breeders who thought that one should 
sing and all the rest content themselves with say- 
ing "Amen." It was a question whether women 
should be suffered to sing, and it was proposed 
to confine vocal music to godly men regardless 
of their voices, not allowing " carnall men and 
Pagans " to join in public singing. There were 
other propositions of the sort, but as Cotton 
opposed them and attributed them to Satan, we 
need not drag them out of their centuries of obliv- 
ion. One that Cotton does not mention was that of 
the saintly Separatist and master scruple-monger, 
Smyth, of Amsterdam, who regarded it as "unlaw- 
ful to have the book before the eye in the time of 
singing a psalm." The Pilgrims of Leyden, on the 



Weights and Measures of Conduet. 



187 



other hand, would not read the psalm line by line 
as sung, until at length they adopted the common 
mode of the time out of regard for a brother who 
could not read. To such extremes did anti-ritual- 
ism go. A scruple against using music books in 
service time caused musical notation to be forgot- 
ten almost throughout New England in the seven- 
teenth century. The number of tunes in general 
use was about eight or ten, and in certain congre- 
gations but half that number. In some places the 
worship was without singing, failing any one who 
could "take the run of the tune," as the phrase was. 
Familiar tunes were corrupted in oral transmission ; 
the same tune varied essentially in congregations a 
few miles apart ; in some places the name of an old 
tune was all that could be recognized, the music 
having been " miserably tortured and twisted and 
quavered into a horrible medley of confused and 
disorderly noises." A writer of 1721 declares that 
the music was so " dragged " that it was necessary 
sometimes to take breath twice in one note. Psalm 
singing in the other colonies was probably not 
better than that in New England. In the Angli- 
can churches, as in Puritan worship, the psalm to 
be sung was read off line by line before the several 
lines were sung. One of the reforms advocated 
by Commissary Bray during his brief dash into 
Maryland in 1700 was the teaching of catechumens 
to sing the psalm " artificially." Even at the begin- 
ning of the Revolution Boucher declares that the 
psalmody was everywhere "ordinary and mean." 



Chap. IV. 



Note 33. 



i88 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Conn. 
Valley 
Hist. 
Society 
Collec- 
tions, 42. 
N. E. 
Chronicle, 
passim. 



Preface to 
New Eng- 
land ver- 
sion of the 
Psalms, 
1640. The 
so-called 
"Bay 
Psalm 
Book." 

Mulcaster's 

Positions, 

38. 



The multi- 
tude of 
scruples. 



There were not six organs in Maryland and Vir- 
ginia, and there were churches in which there was 
no singing at all. Scruples aside, the obsolescence 
of music in New England was probably inevitable. 
But when soon after 1700 efforts were made to 
introduce music books into Puritan meeting-houses 
a sol-fa controversy arose, the conservative mind 
imagining that devotion itself would perish if 
written music displaced the barbarous discord that 
harmonized with bare and square architecture. In 
the preface to the New England Psalm Book the 
versifiers wind their logic through a sinuous argu- 
ment to prove that the use of instrumental music in 
Jewish worship was "ceremoniall," while the psalm 
singing itself was " morall " and of perpetual obli- 
gation. The preface makes a merit of the rough- 
hewn literalness of the version urging that " God's 
altar needs not our pollietys." Beneath this os- 
tensible argument lay an element of all austere sys- 
tems of morality, a notion that pleasure had some- 
thing reprehensible about it. People opposed 
church music on this ground, accusing it of " be- 
witching the mind with syrenes sound." But colo- 
nial psalm singing could hardly be charged with 
such perilous seductions. 



XXVI. 

New England did not stop with forbidding 
music books ; in spite of Cotton's judgment to the 
contrary, the Bible itself was excluded from the 



Weights a?id Measures of Conduct. 



189 



service for fear of ritualism, except where the 
reading was for immediate exposition. In 1699, 
when Puritanism was fast losing its vigor, the new 
Brattle Street Church in Boston took the bold 
step of having passages from the Bible read as a 
part of public worship. Colman, the Brattle Street 
pastor, was so bold a ritualist as to repeat the 
Lord's Prayer after his own. Very slowly these 
new decencies of worship made their way. A 
church organ was too " ceremonial " even for the 
innovating Brattle Street Church, which refused a 
proffered gift of one. Not only must music be 
sung by rote and prayers not be read, but sermons 
must be given without notes. Warham, the first 
to use notes in the pulpit, was " much faulted for 
it." Puritanism habitually regarded religion and 
beauty as antagonists. Its leaders in England con- 
demned the use of rhetorical ornaments, particu- 
larly those drawn from heathen sources. The 
bare hardness of expression and the absence of 
anything like style in early New England sermons 
was probably voluntary at first. Little conven- 
tional decorums, like the ring in marriage and mar- 
riage by a minister, and receiving the eucharist 
without gloves on, were the butt of scruples. At 
their first coming the New-Englanders called their 
places of worship churches, but here was a fine 
opening for scrupulosity. In order not to ascribe 
sacredness to a building, the merely descriptive 
term meeting-house was substituted, that being 
wholly free from any pleasant or decorous associa- 



Chap. IV. 

Mather's 
Ratio 
Discipl,, 
65. Lewis's 
Lynn, io6. 
Turell's 
Life of 
Coleman, 
pp. 42, 178. 
Compare 
Se wall's 
Diary, ii, 
394- 



Magnalia, 
iii, 121, 
folio ed. 
Nugae 
Antiq., 
passim. 



Lewis's 
Lynn, io8. 
Sewall, iii, 
279. 

Prince's 
Annals 
under Oct. 
15, 1629. 



190 



The Transit of Civilizatio7i. 



tion. A minister might not pray over a new- 
made grave ; it would grow into prayer for the 
dead. As there was no axe or hammer heard 
in the Jewish temple work, the Plymouth Pil- 
grims refused to take the negative in asking the 
assent of the church to a conclusion of the elders, 
and perhaps for the same reason the early Massa- 
chusetts churches formally confirmed the choice 
of a pastor by "silent votes" of some sort in the 
presence of the magistrates. Strangest of all was 
the scruple generally accepted at first that obliged 
women to wear veils during public worship. After 
Cotton's arrival and opposition, it was only in 
Salem, where Endecott was the chief upholder of 
the practice, that all the women went to meeting 
veiled, as if to deprive public worship of its last 
element of extraneous interest. 



XXVII. 

Many scruples of that age must pass unnoticed ; 
a few others we may select for their bric-a-brac in- 
terest. The giving to children pious and signifi- 
cant names was not primarily a Puritan notion ; 
Bishop Jewell has a whole page of black letter in 
favor of it, and he derives it from Chrysostom, the 
Church father. Cartwright, the Puritan leader of 
Elizabeth's time, also opposed the giving of pagan 
names to children. The scruple was too congenial 
to the Puritan mind not to find a place in New Eng- 
land, and the early Latin canons, already quoted, 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



191 



forbade the giving of " barbarous and superstitious 
names," and recommended those that are "ex- 
pressed in sacred letters." New England accord- 
ingly blossomed, not only with Hebrew names 
whose frequent incongruity with Saxon surnames 
was not then felt, but also with nouns, verbs, and 
participles, such as Love, Hope, Unite, Increase, 
Seaborn, Preserved, Wrastle, Humility, Supply, 
Hopestill, Waitstill, and other significant and hor- 
tatory words, some of them given indifferently to 
either sex. But the practice did not take deep 
root, and it was one of the first peculiarities to dis- 
appear with the relaxing of Puritanism when New 
England life began to line up again with English 
traditions in the second half of the century. The 
scruple against taking interest on money prevailed 
widely among religious people generally, and the 
matter was much debated, but New England seems 
to have escaped thralldom to a precept so illogical. 
In a new country where capital is lacking and op- 
portunities for its profitable use are many, the 
reasonableness of an interest charge is evident, and 
a scruple about usury is too expensive to be afford- 
ed. Under the circumstances, the law forbidding 
the Jews to lend on interest to one another became 
ceremonial, on what ground does not appear. 

Another instance of this narrow scripturism is 
found in the aversion to a census. In 1634, when 
the population of Massachusetts was estimated at 
four thousand, the magistrates did not dare enu- 
merate them on account of " David's example," and 



Chap. IV. 
Note 35. I 



Note 36. 



Win- 
throp's 
letter to Sir 
N. Rich. 



192 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. IV. 



Docs. rel. 
toN. Y.,v, 
339. 459- 



Smith's 

Hist. 

N. Y., 302. 



The su- 
premacy 
of con- 



it is probably owing to this fear that we are with- 
out trustworthy information regarding the growth 
of population in the colonies. In 1712 Hunter, 
Governor of New York, proposed to ignore Da- 
vid's example, but the fear of the people defeated 
his attempt to secure a census of that colony, 
there having been an epidemic after an earlier 
count. By numbering the freemen not in the mi- 
litia, and adding in the already known number of 
militiamen, he learned the number of men. The 
women and children were afterward taken sepa- 
rately, and the inquisitive governor found means 
of counting, probably from tax lists, the white and 
black bondsmen. Simple addition did the rest, and 
there was no pestilence. The inhabitants of New 
Jersey, " being generally of New England extrac- 
tion, and thereby enthusiasts," as Governor Hunter 
said, " were more difficult to count." In a later 
census of New York, females above sixty years of 
age were omitted. This bit of chicane practiced 
against Omniscience allayed the pious fears of the 
people. New-Englanders were not the only enthu- 
siasts on this subject. Even after the Revolution, 
Pennsylvanians attributed an epidemic of yellow 
fever to the first United States census. 



XXVIII. 

Puritanism made one great contribution to hu-j 
man culture. More emphatically than any othei 
movement of modern times, it taught the suprem-j 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



193 



acy of conscience. There were instances of men 
who slew their natural affections in a sublime de- 
votion to duty as they understood it. A minister 
felt bound to report the seditious speeches of his 
son, and a magistrate sentenced his own daughter to 
the whipping-post. Conscience could not long re- 
main at high tide, the ebb was inevitable. The last 
half of the seventeenth century saw a swift declen- 
sion from primitive Puritan ideals. But through 
such temporary and aberrant exercises the moral 
nature of the race is developed ; by such efforts to 
attain a visionary and impossible excellence is the 
sense of right and wrong made strenuous enough to 
refuse the bribes of sensuality and of worldly ambi- 
tion. The successors of those who exercised their 
consciences on frivolous judgments about apparel, 
psalm singing, and imaginary idolatries in the names 
of islands and days, may put their hereditary strenu- 
ousness or their traditional preference for ethical 
considerations into the promotion of substantial so- 
cial betterments. The ferment may not be pleas- 
ant, but the brew is good at the last. The weak- 
ness of Puritanism was the weakness of its age. 
The Virginia justice, like the New England magis- 
trate, toiled at the task of reformation by punish- 
ing with fines, and stocks, and branks, and ducking 
stool, and whipping-post, offenders for lying, swear- 
ing, scolding, drunkenness, and other sins. Such 
was the English method in the Stuart period. 
Neither among Puritans nor among Anglicans was 
there any clear vision of the spiritual advantage of 



Chap. IV. 



Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
158 ; ii, 
114. 



Comp. 
Nichol's 
Eng. Poor 
Law, 1,219. 



194 



The Transit of Civilizatioji. 



morality. It was the outside of the cup and platter 
that got all this rubbing. But Pharisaism is a stage 
in human progress. More objectionable than the 
externalism was the absence of humanity. The 
pitiless penalties, the punishments inflicted on mere 
children and on half-insane women for hysterical 
words and acts, the ruthless creeds, the ferocious 
pursuit of the weak and defenseless accused of 
witchcraft or heresy, the unreproved delight of the 
mob in seeing brutes torn to pieces by dogs, pro- 
voke something like execration. But condemna- 
tion dies upon the lips when we reflect that ages 
to come may find many things damnable in the 
civilization of a more modern time. 



Elucidations. 

Down to the Revolution class distinctions were sharply marked, 
especially in New York and Virginia. Compare Castiglioni, Vi- 
aggi negli Stati Uniti, passim, Pictet's Tableau des Etats Unis, 
ii, i8i, and the remarks in Virginia Calender, i, p. ix, with many 
other well-known authorities. The maintenance of social dis- 
tinctions in the assignment of seats in church was of course Eng- 
lish. There is an instance of elaborate classification according 
to the rank in the Assembly Books of the Borough of Eye in 
1650, in the Tenth Report of the Royal Historical MSS. Com- 
mission, part iv, p. 534, where both the northern and southern 
colonial ways are exemplified. The twenty-four common council- 
men of Eye sat together, as the burgesses did at Annapolis in 
the eighteenth century. On the effect of the aristocratic precon- 
ception in law, compare Cotton's proposed laws of 1641, where 
three punishments are prescribed for slander. The third is, 
" By stripes if the slander be gross, or odious against such per- 
sons whom a man ought to honor and cherish, whether they be 
his superiors or in some degree of equality with himself or his 
I wife." Ward, who wrote the code preferred to Cotton's, did not 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



195 



like the referendum by which his code was sent to be considered 
in the several towns. " I question," he writes, "whether it be 
of God to interest the inferior sort in that which should be re- 
served inter optimates penes quos est sancire leges." Whitmore's 
Introduction to Code of 1660, p. 19. There have been in every 
age those who demanded justice for the lowly in the name of re- 
ligion. In an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the tenth century a 
bishop is enjoined not to suffer " any Christian man too greatly 
to injure another ; nor the powerful the weak, nor the higher the 
lower, . . . not even his thralls, because they and those that are 
free are equally dear to God." Institutes Civil and Ecclesiastical, 
published by the Record Commission. 

The notion expressed in this beginning of the Assembly's 
Catechism was perhaps suggested by the first question and an- 
swer in Calvin's Catechism : 

M. Quis humanje vit£e prjecipuus est finis ? 

P. Ut Deum, a quo conditi sunt homines ipsi noverint. 

Compare the Select Cases of Conscience, by Shephard, of 
Cambridge, Mass., p. 14, and his Treatise on the Sabbath. A 
more moral theism than that of the Westminster Assembly was 
held in that time by Sir Kenelm Digby, who says, " Man is gov- 
erned by God alwaies for the good of Man himself." 

By the Constitution of 1638 the several plantations in Con- 
necticut agreed to " conjoyne our selves to be one Publike State 
or Comonwelth," and entered into " Combination and Confedera- 
tion together, to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and the 
purity of the Gospell of our Lord Jesus which we now professe, 
as also the disciplyne of the churches which, according to the 
truth of the said gospell, is now practiced amoungst vs." Con- 
necticut Records, i, 20. On this subordination of the State com- 
pare Cotton's Abstract of Laws, iv, 4. 

Cotton appeals to the favorite casuist of the Puritans, Dr. Per- 
kins, who held that the Scripture contains a " platforme, not onely 
of theology, but also of other sacred sciences (as he calls them), 
. . . ethiks, oeconomicks, politicks, church government, prophecy, 
academy." It was characteristic of the age that this conclusion 
was not deduced from the subject-matter of the Bible, but from the 
fitness of things. " It is very suitable to God's all-sufficient wis- 
dome," argues Cotton. Letter written in 1636 to Lord Say and 
Seal in Hutchinson's Massachusetts, i, 497. In the same letter 
Cotton writes ; " Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did 



Chap. IV. 



Note 2, 
page 145. 



Note 3, 
page 145. 



Note 4, 
page 147. 



Note 5, 
page 147. 



196 



The Transit of Civilization. 



ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. 
If the people be governors, who shall be governed ? As for mon- 
archy and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approoved, 
and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to 
himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best form of 
government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church." 

About the same period Samuel Danforth, a student, after- 
ward a well-known minister and one of the earliest mathemati- 
cians in New England, refused to recite the praises of the gods in 
heathen poetry, but saved the point by amending his classics as 
he proceeded, to the disgust of his tutor. Cotton Mather adds a 
marvelous ending to this anecdote, to the effect that the tutor was 
smitten with convulsions for reproving the lad ; but we may in 
turn take the liberty to revise Mather before believing. Magna- 
lia iv, c. iii, 2. 

Punishment for blaspheming was derived from the mediaeval 
codes. Antonius Matthasus the second, in his De Criminibus, 
published in 1644, p. 643, says that in Holland the old rubric 
against blaspheming " the Mother of God, the saints or saintesses " 
(Moeder Gods, oft den sancten, of sanctinnen), was changed at the 
Reformation to a law against blasphemy of Almighty God or his 
holy word. But Matthsus quotes Plato's Minos that it is an in- 
dignity to the Deity to speak evil of a " man like himself" — that 
is, any good man. 

There were those apparently who evaded the law against 
health drinking by merely drinking to one another. This is con- 
demned in a Massachusetts act of September, 1639, Records, i, 
271. Compare the Pennsylvania law of 1682 and that of 1705 
" Against Health Drinking," in which the tendency to intemper- 
ance is made the ostensible reason. See also Winthrop's Journal 
in various places. Practical reasons, such as the danger of excess, 
probably lay below all the objections to health drinking, but it 
was characteristic of the age that the religious reasons were 
sent to the fore, especially by the earlier objectors. In the 
"Great Evil of Health Drinking," published in 1684, the pro- 
faneness of the practice and its danger are both urged. Retro- 
spective Review, xii, 322. Health drinking was thought to have 
been introduced into England at the time of Sir John Norris's 
expedition to the Netherlands — that is, after 1585. 

" Every shred of Gold drawn out of a wedge of Gold is as 
much Gold as the whole lumpe and wedge. Whatever is drawn 



A 



Weights mid Measures of Conduct. 



197 



out of the scripture by just consequence and deduction is as well 
the word of God as that which is an expresse Commandment." 
Cotton's Grounds and Ends of the Baptisme of the Children, p. 4. 

Ninth Report of Royal Commission on Hist. MSS., part i, 
appendix, p. 155, Records of City of Canterbury, 1554-5: " Rec* 
of Rich. Orchardson, Shomaker, for openyng his wyndowes on a 
Sonday in servyce tyme, and for that his chymney was on fyre by 
nyght, and for that he was very poore he was forgev'yn payment 
for the whole." This is said to be the first record of indictment 
for Sabbath breaking. 

Archdeacon Hakewill says in 1627 : " Common swearing, sim- 
ple fornication, prophaning the Lord's Day and the like, in for- 
mer times were scarce knowne to be sinnes ; but being now by the 
light of the Gospell discovered to be such, and that in a high de- 
gree, as they are straitly forbidden by God's Law, so is the edge of 
our Lawes turned against them." Apologie, 466. 

" Our pleasure likewise is, that the bishop of that diocesse take 
the like straight order with all the Puritans and Precisians within 
the same, either constraining them to conform themselves, or to 
leave the countrey according to the lawes of the kingdome and 
canons of our church, and so to strike equally on both hands 
against the contemners of our authority and adversaries of our 
church. And as for our good people's lawfuU recreation, our 
pleasure likewise is, that, after the end of divine service, our good 
people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful 
recreation, such as dancing, either men or women, archerie, for 
men, leaping, vaulting or any other harmless recreation, nor from 
having May games, Whitson ales, and Morris dances, and the 
setting of May-po1es and other sports therewith used, so as the 
same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or 
neglect of divine service ; and that women shall have leave to 
carry rushes to the church for the decoring of it, according to 
their old custom." The King's Majesties Declaration to his Sub- 
jects concerning lawful Sports to be used. 

The allusions to the early Virginia life in the text are based 
on the whole literature relating to colonial Virginia in print and 
manuscript, and the authorities are too numerous for specifica- 
tion. The multitude of documents of all sorts relating to Virginia 
life in the eighteenth century throw a strong backward light on 
the earlier and ruder period, but there is no lack of seventeenth 



Chap. IV. 



Note 10, 
page 155. 



Note II, 
page 155. 



Note 12, 
page 156. 



Note 13, 
page 160. 



198 



The Trajisit of Civilization. 



century writings from which to make up a picture of the times. 
The period has usually been misapprehended. It is necessary to 
remember that until the last fifteen years of the seventeenth cen- 
tury negro slavery was an insignificant element of Virginia life. 
This is one of the great points of difference from the later period. 

The reader is referred to my tracing of this early rise of Sab- 
bathism in The Beginners of a Nation. To the authorities there 
cited I here add Cranmer's Catechism, so called, which I had 
not seen when that work appeared. Its date is about 1548. 
" And therefore that this Christian libertie maye be kepte and 
mainteyned, we now kepe no more the saboth on Saturday as the 
Jews do, but we observe the Sondaye and certayne other daies as 
the maistrates do iudge it convenient." This catechism was ren- 
dered from a Latin version made by Justus Jonas of a German 
catechism. The Lutheran catechism adds " the pastors of the 
churches " to the magistrates in the passage quoted above. In 
both catechisms these Sabbaths and holy days of human appoint- 
ment are to be rather strictly devoted to religious duties and not 
to idleness and " ungodly works." Compare Catechism of Thomas 
Becon, chaplain to Cranmer, pp. 82, 83, where the ground is sub- 
stantially the same. 

Laxity in Sabbath keeping brought " Wrath Fires and other 
judgments upon a professing people," declared the Synod of 
1679. There are traces of this association of fires with neglect 
of the Sabbath or divine worship in several places. Compare 
Plymouth Records, v, 177. Penhallow, writing in 1725 of the 
eastern Indian wars, says very ambiguously, " It is remarkably 
observable that among all the settlements and towns of figure 
and distinction, not one of them have been utterly destroyed 
wherever a church was gathered." Perhaps churches were 
rarely " gathered " in pioneer towns. Compare the " nede and 
povertie " anciently believed to befall Sabbath breakers, as in 
Cranmer's Catechism of 1 548 on the " thirde precepte," Oxford 
edition, 1829, p. 43, and the corresponding Latin of Justus Jonas, 
1539, in the same volume, p. 33. 

During Puritan domination in Maryland a man was arrested 
in 1656, the charge being " that hee shott and kild a turkey upon 
Sunday Contrairie to the said Act " of Assembly, but he was 
allowed to go free on declaring himself " sorie for his Offense." 
Hanson's Old Kent, 212. 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



199 



Something like the principle I have formulated, though not 
quite the same, may be traced in Beccaria, when in his Dei Delitti 
e delle Pene, he says that strong emotions, born of enthusiasm, 
when they become enfeebled and wasted by time, gradually be- 
come the wisdom of the age and a useful instrument in strong 
and expert hands. " Le passioni forti, figle del fanatismo e del 
entusiasmo indebolite e rose, diro cosi, dal tempo, che riduce 
tutti i fenomeni fisici e morali all' equilibrio diventano, a poco a 
poco, la prudenza del secolo, e lo stromento utile in mano forte e 
deir accorto." 

Earlier than the change of evangelicalism to philanthropy 
came the outgrowth of a similar altruism from the enthusiasm of 
the early Quakers. I have reserved the treatment of this develop- 
ment of the reformatory spirit for a future volume of this series, 
in which there will be occasion to study the origins and results of 
Quakerism in examining the rise of the West Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania colonies. 

On pp. 4 and 5 of the Practice of Piety some of the things 
that must be known are thus set forth for a hair-splitting genera- 
tion : " In the Vnity of the Godhead there is a plurality which 
is not accidentall (for God is a most pure act and admits no 
accidents) nor essentiall (for God is one Essence only) but per- 
sonall." There are pages of this ethereal verbalism. In the 
Select Cases of Conscience, by Shephard, of Cambridge, Mass., 
there is an abstruse disquisition " Of Conceiving aright of the 
Holy Trinity," and another " Of Ordering the thoughts aright in 
Civil Employments." From one on " Sinful Distractions " this 
example of the absence of a discriminating sense of proportion 
will serve: "You do not onely deserve, but are under the sen- 
tence of death and curse of God, immediately after the least 
hairs-breadth swarving from the Law by the smallest Sinne, and 
most involuntary accidentall infirmity," " the least sinne being (ex 
parte objecti), in respect of God against whom it is committed, 
as horrible and as great as the greatest." There were those who 
maintained that ringing chimes on Sunday was as great an of- 
fense as parricide, any sin being, in Shephard's, phrase, " the dis- 
honoring of infinite Majesty," pp. 13, 14. 

The Westminster Assembly, in trying to avoid the incon- 
gruity of condemning a man for good works, takes the dilemma 
by both horns. "Works done by unregenerate men although 
for the matter of them . . . they are sinful, ... yet their neglect 
14 



Chap. IV, 

Note 17, 
page 168. 



Note 18, 
page 168. 



Note 19, 
page 170. 



Note 20, 
page 172. 



200 



The Transit of Civilization. 



of them is more sinful and displeasing with God." The Humble 
Advice of the Assembly of Divines, etc. 

Cranmer's Catechism of 1548, edition of 1829, p. 51, says, " If 
we should have heathen parents and dye without baptisme, we 
should be damned everlastingly." Cranmer here follows closely 
the Lutheran version, which reads : " Quando autem Ethnicos et 
impios parentes haberemus, et sine baptisme moreremur, in aster- 
num damnaremur." The phrases of the catechism of Nowell, 
such as "digni aeterna damnative," as applied to the unbaptized, 
have the inclusiveness of the church catechism, of which Nowell 
was probably the author. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Cranmer, 
in his elaborate catechism, vehemently repudiates the notion that 
Christian children dying without baptism are damned, but his 
arguments leave no room for the salvation of the infants of hea- 
then parents. ParkerSociety edition, p. 22 and following. Bishop 
Jewell admits the possible salvation of men without the sac- 
rament, and cites the penitent thief, but such cases he treats as 
exceptional. Works, 161 1, p. 261 and following. Anglican theo- 
logians in the seventeenth century generally content themselves 
with ascribing saving virtue to baptism, but they seem to shrink 
from the converse, that all children unbaptized will be damned, 
which was yet the general belief. Jeremy Taylor, in his Life of 
the Holy Jesus, section ix, discourse vi, pt. ii, 24, does not fol- 
low the " hard father of the children," Augustine, in denying sal- 
vation to unbaptized infants, but he can not escape from the pre- 
vailing ambiguity of his class. He says "well may we lament 
the death of poor babes" unbaptized, because if it is due to 
the parents' neglect " we may weep as those that have no hope." 
He throws the matter on God's goodness, but with much dubiety. 
This narrow admission of unauthorized hope made the Anglican 
by so much more modern and humane than such fathers as Am- 
brose and Augustine on the one hand, and the Calvinist divines of 
the time on the other. The value attached to baptism by the 
people is very evident. There is somewhere an anecdote of two 
scapegrace parsons from Virginia, who paid the expenses of a 
junketing tour in North Carolina by fees for baptism. Story, the 
Quaker preacher, in 1699, heard a woman publicly reproach Lill- 
ingston, the incumbent of a Maryland parish, with having de- 
manded a hogshead of tobacco for baptizing each of her five chil- 
dren. Story's Journal, 229. It was believed in Virginia that a 
son of a chief of the Doegs, who had been " pawewawd " or be- 
witched, was disenchanted and healed by the administration of 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



201 



baptism, and this miracle "was taken for a convincing proof 
against infidelity." T. M.'s Beginning, etc., of Bacon's Rebellion, 
in Force, i, 9. Traditional notions about the saving efficacy of 
baptism were not wholly eradicated from the minds of the first 
generation of New Englanders. " The people begin to com- 
plain," writes Lechford about a dozen years after Winthrop's 
migration, that " their children for the most part remain unbap- 
tized : and so have little more priviledge than Heathens." Plaine 
Dealing, 89. The exclusion from baptism of the children of par- 
ents not in covenant with the church led to much correspond- 
ence between New England divines and Puritans in England, and 
tractates appeared on both sides. An Apologie of the Church in 
New England, . . . sent over in answer to Mr. Barnard in the 
year 1639, I saw in the White- Kennett Library in London, and 
there now lies before me Church Government and Church Cove- 
nant Discussed, etc., 1643. This is Richard Mather's reply to 
thirty-two questions sent him by ministers known to him in Lan- 
cashire and Cheshire. There is also before me a little volume 
dated 1643, with a long title beginning, " A Letter of Many Min- 
isters in Old England." It contains two letters from England 
and two from New England, the dates running from 1637 to 1640. 
The sore question of the exclusion of many children from baptism 
is treated in all these publications and in others of the same pe- 
riod, notably Cotton's Way of Churches, 1645, and Hooker's 
Summe of Church Discipline, 1648. W^hile Cotton and Hooker 
lived, New England made no concession to the clamor of those 
whose children were excluded, and the United Colonies, Plymouth 
reserving its opinion, demanded that " Baptisme, the seale of the 
Covenant, be administered only " to covenant members of the 
churches " and their ymediate seed." Hazard State Papers, ii, 
73, 74. The Cambridge Platform, adopted in 1648, did not relax 
this proscription. But the younger generation was by this time 
coming to the lead, the example of Puritans in England was on 
the side of inclusion, and Quakers and Baptists were a little later 
making inroads. Puritanism in New England also felt the recoil 
of the Restoration in 1660. The fifth proposition, adopted in 
1662, indicates a sweeping change in policy. Of the two old 
leaders still surviving, Richard Mather favored the change and 
John Norton was temporarily absent in England. Compare the 
Platform of 1648, largely the work of Norton, in Results of Three 
Synods (1725), pp. 1-49, with the deliverance of 1662 in the same, 
74-88. On certain conditions baptized persons were, after 1662, 



Chap. IV. 



202 



The Transit of Civilization. 



allowed to bring their children to the font. This was known 
as the halfway covenant. Having served its purpose for two 
or three generations, this " halfway covenant plan " went to 
pieces in the religious excitement under Whitefield and others 
after 1740. Perhaps its disappearance was favored by the grad- 
ual decay of the old English notion of the indispensability of bap- 
tism to salvation. 

" I desire if such were the will of God, and so could gladly 
believe if the scriptures taught it, that all [infants] were saved." 
It is with these words that Robinson qualifies his acceptance of 
the doctrine of infant damnation. Works, iii, 233. 

John Cotton, whose first thought was of the integrity of his 
theological system, maintained in his Grounds and Ends of the 
Baptisme of the Children of the Faithfull, that elect infants have 
faith given to them and are saved by faith. But the commoner 
opinion was perhaps expressed by Wigglesworth, that they were 
sanctified " by ways unknown to men." Day of Doom, xxv. 
One gets the notion that in the unwritten creed of New England 
the elect infants were to be found among the baptized children 
of the faithful. A young man of Connecticut told Story, the 
Quaker, that unbaptized infants were all lost, but he did not 
think that all baptized infants would be saved, and this was per- 
haps the popular feeling. Story's Journal, 308. Cotton attached 
so much importance to baptism that in the work cited above he 
expresses the opinion that a house was burned on account of the 
owner's honest scruples regarding infant baptism. The Con- 
fession of Dort, the most authoritative of Calvinist creeds, per- 
haps, declares that the children of the faithful are holy by the 
free benefit of the covenant in which they are included with their 
parents, and says that pious parents ought not to doubt concern- 
ing the salvation of their children taken away in infancy — " pii 
parentes de Electione et Salute suorum. liberorum, quos Deus in 
infantia ex hac vita evocat, dubitare non debent." I Doctrins, 
caput xvii, in Sylloge Confessionum sub tempus Reformandas 
Ecclesiee, p. 376. This giving a kind of certainty in the case of 
the children of religious parents, took the place of the old de- 
pendence on baptism. 

Of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, Sibley says: "This work 
represented the theology of the day, and for a century, with the 
exception perhaps of the Bible, was more popular throughout 
New England than any other that can be named. It passed 



Weights and Measures of Conduct. 



203 



through several editions in book form, and was also printed on 
broadsides and hawked about the country. As late as the early 
part of the present (nineteenth) century many persons could re- 
peat the whole or large portions of it." Harvard Graduates, i, 
272. 

Cotton Mather recounts an incident of a New England min- 
ister exhorting a criminal condemned to death to repent of 
Adam's sin — " the guilt of the First Sin committed by Adam 
was justly charged upon " him. Magnalia, book vi, p. 44, origi- 
nal edition. On this tendency of the time to give a merely legal 
character to sin, compare in Fuller's Good Thoughts for Bad 
Times, p. 277, " Imprimis, the sin of his conception." 

So much of the mediaeval limbo survived in New England Cal- 
vinism. Compare Wigglesworth's "the easiest room in hell" 
with Dante's " primo cerchio che I'abisso eigne," that circle lying 
round the abyss, in which are heard no lamentations save sighs 
that made the eternal air to palpitate, and where were a great 
throng "of infants, of women, and mature men," who had not 
sinned, but had missed of heaven for want of baptism. 

. . . e s'elli hanno mercedi, 
Non basta, perch'ei non ebber battesmo 
Ch'e', porta. 

This notion of baptism as " the gate " survived in the Anglican 
colonies, and no doubt the limbo, or " easiest room in hell," was 
also a popular survival elsewhere than in New England. It is 
noteworthy that Quakerism, having no system to complete, refused 
to admit the damnation of infants, or to impute " the sin of Adam 
to all the little children, so as to effect their Eternal State." 
Story's Journal, 1699, pp. 218, 219. Compare p. 308. This milder 
theology and the doctrine of non-resistance seem to have affected 
the administration of law in the Quaker colony. See Colonial 
Records of Pennsylvania, iii, 45, and elsewhere for instances. 

The preface to the New England Psalm Book of 1640 main- 
tains that it is a moral and perpetual duty to sing every sort of 
David's psalms. And " the book of psalms is so compleat a sys- 
tem of psalms which the . . . infinite wisdome hath made to suit 
all the conditions, necessityes, affections, etc., of men in all ages," 
as to " stoppe all men's mouths and mindes " from writing or 
singing any other psalms or hymns. 

Cotton held that because the " temple should be filled with 
smoke " at a certain period described in the Apocalypse, there 



Chap. IV. 



Note 25, 
page 177. 



Note 26, 
page 177. 



Note 27, 
page 178, 



Note 28, 
page 180. 



204 



The Transit of Civilization. 



could be no general conversion of the Indians. Of the apostle 
Eliot Sewall records this : " Mr. Eliot in his first attempt to make 
them [the Indians] Christian was much concerned to find out 
some Promise in the Scriptures relating to them. . . . But after- 
ward he concluded that the Thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel 
was written principally for their sakes." Phenomena quasdam 
Apocalyptica, Dedicatory Letter, 

In the little summary of opinions against cockfighting pub- 
lished in 1660 by Edrnond Ellis and to be found in the Harleian 
Miscellany, as cited in the margin of the text, one reads, "The 
baiting of the bull hath its use, and therefore is commended of 
civil authority." Was there ever any sport so reprehensible that 
this defense of utility was not set up in its favor } From Perkins's 
Cases of Conscience, 1632, Ellis quotes : " The antipathy and 
cruelty, which one beast showeth to another, is the fruit of our 
rebellion against God, and should rather move us to mourn than 
to rejoice." He quotes a similar argument from Bolton's General 
Directions for a comfortable walking with God. From Dod and 
Cleaver he quotes a direct appeal to humane feeling against cruel 
sports, Vk'hich uses the theological argument only subordinately. 
" This proceedeth not of a tender heart. . . . Have our sins in 
Adam brought such calamities upon them and shall we add unto 
them by cruelty in our own persons." 

But the colony of East Jersey, predominantly Puritan, forbade 
bull baiting and cockfighting as sports " which excite people to 
rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion." Barber's Historical 
Collections of New Jersey, 36, under " Early Moral Laws," said 
to be for the most part extracted from a series of articles pub- 
lished in the Newark Daily Advertiser. The date of the act is 
not given, but others in the same section range from 1675 to 
1697. Bull baiting was probably mentioned only to guard against 
its introduction. 

Quatiior potissinium Ministerii or dines Ministrii, Doctores, 
Scniores, Diaconi. Nor do these words take either side of the 
controversy of the time on the position of apostolic teachers, 
whether they were ministers or not. Evidently there was a divi- 
sion on the question. The section concerning them is frankly 
inconclusive — De Doctoribus nondum visum est aliquid consti- 
tuere. The Barrowist system prevailed generally, but not uni- 
versally, in New England. Compare Lechford's Plaine Dealing, 
pp. 4 and 15, and The Temple Measured, by James Noyes, 



Weights arid Measures of Conduct. 



205 



teacher of the church at Newbury, in New England (White- 
Kennett Library, West Indies, M), with various allusions in 
other works implying the presence of one or more churches, 
Presbyterian in form. The early records of the Dedham Church 
define church officers to be " Pastours, Teachers, rulers, Dea- 
cons, and widdowes." On the difficulty of getting widows old 
enough and vigorous enough, see a passage in Cotton's Way 
of the Churches, 1645. See also the Cambridge Platform of 
1648, chap, viii, sec. 7, where the duties of "ancient widows" 
are defined. The New England Synod of 1679 sought to re- 
store the twofold pastorate, already hopelessly gone to decay. 
Question II. " Plebeian ordination " by the laying on of the 
hands of the people was practiced at first, but went out after 
the Synod of 1648. Dexter's Congregationalism, 482, citing 
Magnalia, v. John Hull, in his Diary, 189, considers that the 
birth of a living male child of a woman who had joined the 
church, though her parents were Quakers, and whose other chil- 
dren had been still-born, was evidence that she " owned church 
order." 

The system was full-fledged among Separatists in 1582. 
Barclay's Inner Life of the sects of the Commonwealth cites A 
true Discription out of the Word of God of the visible Church. 
No doubt Barrow, the Separatist, who was executed at Tyburn, 
was the propounder of the completed scheme, though parts of it 
had appeared earlier among the exiles at Frankfort. John Rob- 
inson's Catechism, printed in 1642, but of course written much 
earlier, elaborates this subject carefully. I am indebted to Bar- 
clay as above, p. 104, note, for this reference. On the double 
pastorate in Holland, see The Dutch Drawne to the Life, 1664, 
chap. iii. What I take to be the earliest New England church 
constitution is the Latin paper in the State Paper Office, with 
Laud's indorsement dated 3 March, 1634 — that is, 1635 N. S. 
The authorship, origin, and date of this paper are obscure, but 
internal evidence shows that its origin probably preceded the 
arrival of Cotton in 1633. After Cotton's ascendency began 
there was no general requirement that women should wear veils 
at public worship, as in this paper. The Latin is in places incor- 
rect and badly spelled, and the paper could not have come from 
New England after such good Latinists as Norton and others 
arrived. In this early document ancient widows are not men- 
tioned among the servants of the church, but they are not ex- 
cluded by its phraseology. 



Chap. IV. 



Note 32, 
page 186. 



2o6 



The Transit of Civilization. 



" It is a custom generally used in most, if not in all parish 
churches of this kingdom, as well as among Presbyterians and 
others, that the Clerk alone reads aloud every verse, one after 
another, of the Psalm that is sung before and after the Sermon, 
and that all the people sing it after him." A View of the Gov- 
ernment and Public Worship ... in the Reformed Churches, etc., 
by John Durell, 1662. In New England this custom persisted 
generally in 1726, though some churches by this time had books, 
and sang without waiting for the hymn to be " deaconed." Com- 
pare Cotton Mather's Ratio Disciplinas, 52. Of the disappear- 
ance of the custom in the Anglican churches I can give no 
account. 

The last two points are on the authority of the important 
Latin Canons and Constitutions, indorsed, as stated heretofore, 
3 March, 1634. This is no doubt the date of Laud's reception ot 
them. The title is Canones Regiminis Ecclesiastic! constituti et 
in reformatis Ecclesiis Novo-Anglicanus observati, breviter in 
ordinem digesti. I have made no attempt to control the errors in 
the original paper. On the silent vote the words of this docu- 
ment are : " Sistatur coram Magistratu et tota ecclesia, ut intra 
dies quatuor decim tacitis fidelium sufifragis comprobetur." On 
the wearing of veils in meeting: "Ne quje Mulier proesumat sa- 
cris coetibus adesse nisi capite Velamine tecto." See, further, 
Winthrop's Life and Letters, ii, 109, Winthrop's Journal, i, 149; 
and Hubbard's Massachusetts, 204, 205. 

" Infantibus non sunt danda nomina barbaravel superstitiosa, 
sed in sacris Uteris expressa." Latin Canons as above. 

D'Ewes attributes his father's loss of property to his having 
been guilty of the " controversial sin " of taking interest on money. 
Autobiography i, 43, 44. Comp. Knight's Questio Quodhbetica, 
whether lawful to take use for money, 1657, and others. 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH. 

THE TRADITION OF EDUCATION. 



The history of human life and institutions is 
inwrought of two principles running crisscross to 
one another. Athwart the warp of traditional con- 
tinuity there is woven the woof of variation ; the 
pattern changes by degrees, but the web is with- 
out break or seam. Our system of education is 
sometimes supposed to come from some fountain 
head in America, or at most to be a Protestant 
device dating from the Reformation. But the 
schools that sprang up after the change of re- 
ligion in England marked the persistence of an 
ancient tradition that even such an upheaval could 
not destroy. To find a logical point of beginning 
we must ascend to the early Christian centuries, 
when the work of religious teaching and prose- 
lytism marched abreast. Education was carried 
on in primitive monasteries and in cathedral chap- 
ters of a monastic t3^pe. These far-back monastic 
schools for teaching religion only are connected by 
an unbroken pedigree with our complicated mod- 
ern systems of child training. We may account 
the ancient missionary schools a place of beginning 
because it would tax patience to little purpose to 

207 



Chap. V. 

Continu- 
ity of 
education. 



Comp. 
Rept. of 
Royal 
Cath. 
Com., 
p. iv. 



208 



The Tra?isit of Civilization. 



grope uncertainly in the gray dawn of tradition for 
a connection with sources yet higher up. 



II. 

The instruction given in places of resort for the 
study of early Christian doctrine and observance 
seems to be whole millenniums away from the 
modern conception of education. There were 
schools or at least throngs of scholars about pop- 
ular Christian teachers in England in the fifth cen- 
tury. Later than that the English youth even of 
the nobility were crossing the channel to the re- 
nowned monasteries of Ireland " for the sake of 
divine studies and a more continent life, . . . going 
about from one master's cell to another," as Bede 
tells us. By this voyage to a foreign land these 
young Englishmen learned the Latin of the service 
book and church song, and they acquired also the 
elements of the wisdom of that age, such as the ex- 
cellence of celibacy and the purifying effect of self- 
imposed hunger, which was efificient even to the 
sanctifying of the polluted ground on which crimes 
had been committed. They learned the keeping of 
three Lents a year, and they were taught that it was 
an act of superior devotion in seasons of fasting to 
eat daily only a little bread and milk after sunset, 
the milk being carefully skimmed. The proper 
order of singing the psalter and a method of fixing 
the true date of Easter were also taught, along with 
the doctrine of the damnation of infants unbaptized, 



The Tradition of Education. 



209 



and much other lore now at last happily obsolete. 
These early schools with their skimmed-milk asceti- 
cism at least show the human soul in insurrection 
against the sordidness of barbarism, but they inter- 
est us here because from them is plainly traceable 
across the ages for nearly fifteen hundred years the 
long line of a tradition and habit of education. 
There have been variation and evolution, but there 
has been no break. The monastery school became 
a cathedral school in some cases, and the semi- 
monastic free school grew up alongside them both. 
The rudimentary school in the house of the de- 
tached priest got its impulse and direction from 
the higher schools in the cathedrals, and by slow 
changes the local priest's school became the parish 
school, and in prosaic modern times, by a series 
of transformations, the American district school, 
which last retains few traces of its remote ecclesias- 
tical ancestry. 

III. 

Before the Reformation the main reliance for 
education was on the convent schools. Young 
women were sent to the nunneries to learn to 
" work and reade." Sometimes girls were given a 
little Latin also. Boys learned Latin in their horn- 
books and other " abcees." English in black-letter 
characters came after. The barbarous mediasval 
Latin, often grotesquely macaronied with the vul- 
gar speech, was widely used in records and account 
books of the time. When the monasteries were 



2IO 



The Transit of Civilization. 



suppressed by Henry VIII most of the higher 
schools went down into the abyss with the reli- 
gious houses, and the English nation was faced by 
the ugly fact that it had pretty nearly abolished 
the education of the times, such as it was. For 
remedy the old cathedral schools were supplied 
with lay teachers, and new cathedral trusts with 
provisions for educating choristers and other boys 
for holy orders were established. Now that all the 
religious houses with their schools had been in- 
gulfed, efforts were made to found free grammar 
schools in addition to those that had survived. 
Sixteen such schools were established in the time 
of Edward VI in as many months. But the reign 
of the boy king was brief; the hungry courtiers had 
tasted the savory spoils of the monasteries, and they 
grudged every morsel of it that was given to the 
new free schools. The reactionary rule of Mary fol- 
lowed, and soon after the accession of Elizabeth the 
Speaker of the Commons reminded the young queen 
of the disastrous decay of learning in her kingdom. 
A general zeal was aroused, not for the primary and 
popular education so much in favor in later times, 
but for the founding of free Latin schools. Mul- 
caster, a schoolmaster of the time, relates that the 
schools established in Elizabeth's reign were more 
" than all the rest be that were before her time in 
the whole Realme." Another writer of 1577 says 
that " there are not manie corporat townes now 
vnder the queens dominion that hain not one Gram- 
mar Schoole at the least." The tide wave of zeal 



The Tradition of Education. 



211 



for founding new Latin schools reached its flood 
about the time that emigration to America began, 
and the impulse was felt in all the early colonies. 



IV. 

Much of the primary teaching was done at 
home. There was a great temptation to put this 
burden on the grammar schools, and one finds 
many complaints in England and America regard- 
ing the disposition of parents to be rid of their little 
children, " whereby the usher is overburdened." 
Efforts were made from time to time to repel from 
the Latin school children who were stumbling 
through " the Home Booke, the A. B. C, and the 
Primer." In New Haven the children who " both- 
ered the master by spelling in English " were to be 
forthwith sent home. To supply the place of home 
instruction in the rudiments the dame school had 
grown up. This gatehouse of learning was kept 
sometimes by a busy housewife, sometimes by a 
young woman a little better taught than other 
women. Schoolmasters' daughters were purposely 
fitted to keep such schools in which the alphabet, 
spelling, and primary reading were taught along 
with the catechism, and in which girls learned to 
sew. " Mary goes to Mrs. Thair's to learn to Read 
and Knit " is a significant entry in a Boston diary. 
In Holland at this period there were dame schools 
in the care of women who were themselves unable 
to read, but who taught the children the catechism 



The Transit of Civilization. 



only, and that orally. Nothing so bad as this is 
recorded of English schools of the sort, but the 
dame was, no doubt, sometimes poorly qualified 
even to give instruction as far as the primer. 



V. 

In the middle ages education was begun with 
the rudiments written probably on parchment, 
which was for security nailed to a wooden board, 
or, as an old poem puts it, " Naylyd on a brede of 
tre." Perhaps when paper, a much more perish- 
able substance than parchment, came into use, 
the sheet thus attached to " a board of tree " was 
thought to require an overlay of a thin bit of 
horn to protect it from the destructive fumbling 
of the child. Such hornbooks seem to have be- 
come more common in the seventeenth century 
than before, and there was a disposition to make 
them pleasing to the eye. Both plain hornbooks 
and gilt ones were imported into the colonies in 
the seventeenth century. The hornbook contained 
the alphabet in capitals and in lower-case letters, 
with those easy syllables in two letters known 
at least in later days as the " a b abs." The 
alphabet had been from remote times preceded 
by a cross, from which the first line had come 
to be called the crisscross (or Christ's cross) row. 
The advent of Protestantism did not drive out all 
Catholic usages ; some English children still com- 
mended their beds to " Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 



TJ'c Tradition of Education. 



213 



John," and in country places as late as 1618 alpha- 
betical studies were begun at the crisscross row 
with the ancient prayer, or perhaps one might say 
charm, " Christ's cross be my spede and the Holy 
Ghost," " For feare the Divell should be in the 
letters of the Alphabet," adds the chronicler. But 
the first hornbooks taken to the new Puritan set- 
tlement in New England are said to have had the 
cross obliterated. After the hornbook came the 
" abce " or the "abcie," spelled also in several 
other ways. It comprised a series of little verses 
turning each on some word, which key words 
began with the several letters of the alphabet in 
succession. The device is well known in our later 
times. There were of old " latten abeesees " as 
well as English ones ; the Latin were no doubt the 
more ancient. The primer, notwithstanding its 
name, was the third implement for learning put 
into the hands of a child. It contained at the 
Reformation prayers and religious meditations, 
but in some of its later forms it was much like a 
modern catechism. The primer came at last to in- 
clude the contents of the hornbook and the " abcie " ; 
such was the famous New England Primer which 
had its rise at the close of the seventeenth and 
passed through innumerable editions in the eight- 
eenth century. The usual course was to pass the 
child out of the primer into the psalter — that is, to 
set him to reading Sternhold and Hopkins's version 
of the Psalms in meter. The rugged Bay Psalm 
Book was used as a reader in the days when 



Chap. V. 

The Court 
and Coun- 
try, 1618. 
Roxburghe 
Libr., 
p. 188. 



Note 4. 



Comp. 
Introduc- 
tion to 
Ford's 
Reprint. 



Comp. 

Caulkin's 
New Lon- 
don, 395. 



214 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



approximate rhymes and a rough rhythm were the 
only alleviations of the child's task. But reading 
was also taught from little books " full of precepts 
of ciuilitie " done into verse " such as children will 
soone learne and take delight in thorow the round- 
nesse of the meter," as Schoolmaster Brinsley as- 
sures us. Rules of politeness in verse were cen- 
turies old in Latin, and were by this time common 
in English ; one of these books was " The Schoole 
of Vertue," and there was a " Newe Schoole of 
Vertue " of French origin. To be polite, to " make 
his manners " by bow or courtesy to superiors, to 
stand reverently and modestly aside in the street 
when elders or people of dignity passed by, was 
one of the first and most important steps in early 
American education — it was the virtue of child- 
hood, as it had been from the middle ages. But 
when the lad could read in the psalter without 
spelling the words, he bade adieu to school dame 
and English and was ready to be " entered " in 
Latin, as the phrase went. 



VI. 

By the term grammar school was meant in that 
day a school for beginners in Latin. One might 
learn some paradigms, and even more than this of 
Greek, in the higher grammar schools, and there 
were masters who added some driblets of prelim- 
inary Hebrew, the school thus including all the 
three learned tongues. But virtually its whole 



The Tradition of Education. 



215 



force was spent on Latin, which was still the 
sacred language of religion and learning. Many 
of the pupils in the grammar schools had to be 
taught their English rudiments ; beyond this the 
instruction was almost wholly in Latin. Lilly's 
grammar, with a ponderous and forbidding title, 
was in that language. The difficulty of this had 
at length brought forth some recognized English 
helps for beginners, such as posing books, or, as 
we should say nowadays, question books, on the 
accidence, and there were ponies intended for 
surreptitious use, in the shape of helps to construe 
Lilly's rules ; but English was ostensibly left be- 
hind. The lad must understand when the master 
taught him in Latin, and he was supposed to con- 
verse only in Latin during school hours. Yet in 
spite of " ferula " and birch switches, and the risk 
of being distinguished as the " asinus " or donkey 
of his form, the pupil still contrived to speak much 
to his fellows in his mother tongue. The attempt 
to compel conversation in Latin was not wholly 
successful in England, and it always failed in 
America, even in Harvard College. Disputation 
had been for centuries the favorite means of ren- 
dering scholars expert in Latin and of vitiating 
their general education. The taste for polemics 
had pervaded the universities, and even the gram- 
mar schools, from the earliest times. Lads under 
fifteen were set to dispute in school Latin, often 
" thieving " their arguments on grave questions of 
philosophy or intricate points of grammar, and 
15 



Chap. V. 



Note 5. 



Brinsley's 
Ludus, 
p. 24. 



Note 6. 



Brinsley's 
Ludus, 215. 
Wiggles- 
worth in 
Sibley's 
Harvard 
Graduates, 
i, 267. 
Danker's 
Journal, 
385. 
Note 7. 



Note 8. 



2l6 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Brinsley's 
Ludus 
Literarius, 
29, 47, and 
elsewhere. 



mingling their disputations with boyish sarcasms 
and rude ridicule, in the spirit of the gamecocks, 
in which masters and pupils took delight. 



VII. 

After seven or eight years in what Milton styles 
" the grammatical fiats and shallows," the boy left 
the grammar school for deeper waters. Unless 
he had had an unusually good master the chances 
were that he could read his mother tongue but 
stammeringly — there were pupils who at some 
stage of their early Latin studies lost the art ofj 
reading English entirely. The lad of fifteen 01 
more, on leaving the grammar school, was ignorant 
of numbers ; some boys advanced in Latin did not 
know the numerals, Roman or Arabic, and couU 
not find the chapter in the Bible, "much less the' 
verse." The boy from the grammar school had 
learned to write and to make his own quill pens 
with the point next the middle finger slightly 
thinner and shorter than the other, and to make 
a ruling pen as well, " with a nock like that of an 
arrow." With this he could make two parallel 
lines, and he ruled his own paper thus and wrote 
between the two lines. " Penne, inke, paper, rular, 
plummet, ruling pen, pen-knife," were all included 
in the outfit for learning to write, and there was 
" a blotting paper " to keep the book clean. For 
doing his exercises the pupil used a piece of lead 
thrust into a quill, and he kept a piece of new 



The Tradition of Educatio7i. 



217 



wheat bread at hand for use in erasing pencil 
marks. The grammar-school boy rarely had occa- 
sion to write English, and many scholars from 
early neglect in the grammar schools were " too 
backwards to their dying day " in the art of writ- 
ing the vernacular. The master and his usher 
were often inexpert in writing; in such cases a 
scrivener was sometimes engaged to teach the 
"Roman hand" and the beautiful "secretary hand" 
so puzzling nowadays to unpracticed eyes. There 
were also traveling scriveners who taught pen- 
manship. The lad might be weak in his English 
when he left school, but he made amends for it by 
knowing how to write themes and even verses in 
Latin, The producing of Latin verses was a rather 
wooden handicraft ; the grammar scholar used his 
Flores Poetarum for models, and he could borrow 
elegant ready - made locutions from a thesaurus 
of poetical phrases by Bucklerius. The Sylva 
Synonimorum was also very handy for " schollars 
of iudgement." When the word in mind would 
not scan properly, the verse carpenter could select 
another with the same meaning from this Forest 
of Synonyms. The ambitious young poet rum- 
maged in Textor's Epitheta after decorative adjec- 
tives; for epithets, "if they be choyse, are a 
singular ornament," as Master Brinsley assures 
us. " Descriptions by periphrases " were to be 
had in Holyoke's Dictionary, and there was " Mas- 
ter Draxe his Phrases " and other books " to see 
how many wayes they can vtter anything in good 



Chap. V. 



D'Ewes. 



Note 9. 



Ludus Lit- 

erarius, 

196. 



2l8 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. V. 

Comp. 
D'Ewes's 
Autobiog., 
i, I02, 105. 



Writing 
schools. 



Comp. 
Ciuile and 
vnciuile 
Life, p. 21. 



Comp. 

Willsford's 
Scales of 
Commerce, 
1660, and 
arithmetics 
of the time. 



phrase." One Latin verse was admired because 
its nine words could be arranged in a hundred and 
four ways, perhaps all equally prosaic. 



VIII. 

A boy from the grammar school unable to 
write his mother tongue with any fluency and ig- 
norant of the multiplication table was not fitted for 
the counting house, where his dexterity in cobbling 
Latin verses would avail nothing. For lads des- 
tined to these employments there were English 
schools of various sorts, including many old-fash- 
ioned "common schools" for all classes, which de- 
barbarized their rudimentary English by teaching 
youths also to " congrue Latine." When appear- 
ing alongside the free schools such were some- 
times called " inferior schools " or " trivial schools." 
With the rising importance of trade in the seven- 
teenth century, " writing schools," so called, came 
into prominence. Lads, even of good families, 
who showed more aptitude for money-making than 
for learning Latin were sent to the writing school 
to learn " good hands and accounts." In these 
schools were taught an elaborate penmanship, 
arithmetic in forms somewhat fantastic, and the 
science of bookkeeping, complicated and intricated 
in that day by the multitude of varying monetary 
and metrical systems. Writing schools were private 
ventures, and in contrast to the severity practiced 
in the grammar school the writing school enforced 



The Tradition of Ediication. 



219 



no discipline whatever. Until the close of the 
seventeenth century such homely and useful schools 
were rarely if ever endowed. It was only by 
founding a Latin school that one could hope to 
gain the blessedness of a saint or the glory of a 
patriot. Such was the faith of Englishmen and of 
the founders of the early colonies in America. 
The vulgar utilities of English reading and writing 
and multiplying and dividing were much more 
suited to pioneers in America than Lilly's Latin 
grammar or even than what was esteemed the 
" rare and almost divine matter " of " Tullies 
Offices." But necessary and mercenary arts could 
not be made objects of sentiment by enthusiastic 
benefactors who wrote long letters to the Virginia 
Company ostentatiously subscribing them " Dust 
and Ashes," or laid their money when they were 
done with it at last on the altar of the venerated 
dead languages for the benefit of " poor scholars " 
who had been traditional objects of benevolence 
for centuries. 

IX. 

Valued at first as a means of producing clergy- 
men, we find the grammar school in the fifteenth 
century esteemed in Scotland as a training place 
for public officials " for the king's use." After the 
Reformation it came to be regarded in England, 
Scotland, and Holland as a means for propagating 
Protestant doctrines and eradicating heresy. But 
as potable gold was the universal medicine and 



Chap. V. 

Lives of 
the Norths, 
ii. 293- 
Note 10. 



Comp. 
Brinsley's 
Consola- 
tions. 



Grammar 
school the 
universal 
remedy. 



220 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Venice treacle the antidote to innumerable poisons, 
so the grammar school in that age of idealism be- 
came a cure for all heresy, heathenism, and barbar- 
ism. The greatest schoolmaster of James's reign, 
John Brinsley, laid at the feet of the Virginia Com- 
pany the manuscript of his " Consolations for Ovr 
Grammar Schooles," intended especially for " all 
ruder places, namely for Ireland, Wales, Virginia," 
etc., " God having ordained schooles of learning," 
he declares, " to be a principall meanes to reduce 
a barbarous people to ciuilities." It was in this 
spirit that the Virginia Company allotted land for 
a college at Henrico to bring Indian children to a 
saving knowledge of Christianity and Latin gram- 
mar. For barbarous places " so nuzled vp in rude- 
ness and superstition " it was thought there could 
be no help but in a Latin school. Benefactors 
seeking the conversion of the " infidell's children " 
sent books and maps and money for the new In- 
dian college in Virginia. This was done dramatic- 
ally after the manner of the time. A mysterious 
well-dressed stranger appeared in the open court 
of the Virginia Company, depositing there a box 
in which were found bags of " new gold " for the 
education of the Indians. Passengers on a return- 
ing East Indiaman, hearing news of religious desti- 
tution in Virginia, forthwith collected money ; thisJ 
with other sums, was devoted to the founding of a] 
collegiate school at Charles City. The students 
were to pass out of this " East India School," as it) 
was called, to the college at Henrico, from the] 



The Tradition of Education. 



221 



privileges of which baptized youth were not to be 
quite shut out. To the endowment of the Charles 
City school the Virginia Company added a thou- 
sand acres of land and five apprenticed servants. 
The overthrow of the Company in 1624 involved 
the destruction of these schemes for transplanting 
the education then in vogue to America. Of all 
these benevolent projects there was a few years 
later not a bit of flotsam anywhere to be seen. 



X. 

Benjamin Symmes, a settler in Virginia, was the 
first of emigrant Englishmen to bequeath an educa- 
tional endowment after the pattern set by English 
philanthropists in the ages before him. To found 
a free school in Elizabeth County, Symmes, who 
died in 1634, gave by will two hundred and fifty 
acres of land with an adjacent hay marsh and a herd 
of eight milch cows, which by 1649 had increased 
to forty. Interest-bearing and profit-sharing in- 
vestments were not to be had. The usufruct of 
land and cattle, and sometimes the income from 
cattle alone, had been for centuries the commonest 
form of bequest for benevolent, religious, or super- 
stitious purposes. One Henry Peasley founded a 
Virginia free school in 1675 with a gift of six hun- 
dred acres of land, ten cows, and a brood mare. 
Other public-spirited people gave to Peasley 's 
school negro slaves in place of the obsolete tenants 
of old English endowments and the bond servants 



Chap. V. 

Col.ofVa., 
1622, pp. 
51, 53. 

Note II. 



Symmes's 
and other 
free 

schools in 
Virginia. 



Note 12. 



Hening, 
vii, 41. 
Comp. 
also Neill's 
Educa- 
tional De- 
velopment 
of Va., 26. 



The Transit of Civilization. 



given by the Virginia Company for educational 
uses. In the remaining parish records the exist- 
ence of yet other free-school endowments in colo- 
nial Virginia can be traced. But the free Latin 
school of England was an exotic in Virginia. 
There was no town life, and there was small need 
of dispensing gratuitous Latin to thriving tobacco 
planters in a new country, whose clergy, such as 
they were, were imported ready made, and whose 
laymen at least did their talking and reading in 
mother English. The College of William and 
Mary did not get under way until the last years 
of the seventeenth century ; there was no bishop on 
this side of the sea to induct men into holy orders; 
the primitive statecraft of the colony needed r\o 
other tongue than the vernacular, aided occasion- 
ally by Indian interpreters, so that the free Latin 
school of early Virginia was a short ladder with 
nothing but empty space at the top of it. Latin 
was studied merely as a gentleman's accomplish- 
ment. The abundant wild land, the cheap bond- 
servant labor, and yet cheaper slave labor, which 
became common in the last quarter of the century, 
tempted the young provincial of the Chesapeake 
colonies to land ownership and that culture of the 
soil by the hands of others that had been for ages 
the pursuit of the gentry of the mother country. 
Of the character of the teaching in the few early 
Virginia grammar schools we know nothing. Lit- 
tle private schools early began to spring up at con- 
venient points in the growing settlements which 



The Tradition of Educatio?i. 



223^ 



were stretched in a narrow, sinuous line along the 
marg-ins of the watercourses and estuaries of the 
Chesapeake region. One may infer from the rec- 
ord that there were such schools before 1644, and 
it appears that the cost of a year's " scoleing " at 
that time was equal to that of two pairs of shoes. 
Forty years later, in 1684, there were so many of 
these little country schools that the mercenary 
governor, Lord Howard of Effingham, thought it 
worth while to exact a license fee from every 
schoolmaster. These schools had no relation to 
the parish authorities, but were established and 
conducted by the people spontaneously. "The 
children's fathers hire those schools and pay you 
out of their own pocket " is the quaint statement 
of a clergyman in a report to the Bishop of Lon- 
don in 1724. "To read, write, and cipher" w^as 
usually the whole course. " Care is generally 
taken by parents that their children be taught to 
read " certifies Parson Brunskill. 



XI. 

The schools in Virginia being thus the off- 
spring of the law of demand and suppl}', some of 
the endowed schools seem to have taught arithme- 
tic instead of the dead languages, and one excellent 
private school in 1724 combined numbers with 
Latin and Greek. Virginia life in the first century 
after the settlement was extremely rural, not to 
say rustic ; most of the planters had never seen a 



Chap. V. 

and Hugh 
Jones's 
Va., 70. 

MS. 

Records of 
York Co., 
Va. 



Beverly's 
Va., pt. i, 



Perry's 
Coll. Va., 
268. 



As above, 
279. 



Other 
devices for 
education. 



Note 15. 



224 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



town, and even members of the House of Bur- 
gesses could not conceive of life as tolerable to 
people cooped up in a village where neighbors 
were so near that there was no range for a herd of 
cattle. The development of large landholdings 
began to produce a class of pretty rich planters in 
the last half of the seventeenth century who natu- 
rally wished to give their sons better advantages 
than they could get in the rough old field schools 
or the struggling free schools. Imitating the 
landed proprietors of England, these men brought 
their sons up under private tutors. The natural 
way to accomplish this in Virginia at that time 
was to buy a man trained in an English Latin 
school from among the redemptioners who were 
sold off the ship's deck for a term of years to pay 
their passage. This method of hiring a private 
tutor was in use in 1669 and probably earlier, and 
it seems to have prevailed in the Chesapeake re- 
gion throughout the colonial period. No doubt 
some of the teachers who emigrated in consider- 
able numbers in the prevalent fashion at the cost 
of a temporary loss of liberty were better in- 
structed than many of the ordinary country teach- 
ers of the time. Before 1683 the brilliant William 
Byrd, who was perhaps the first man born in any 
of the colonies with a natural gift for felicitous lit- 
erary expression, had been sent to England for 
education. As time went on, this recurrence to 
the sources of learning in the Old World was fre- 
quent among the rich in the Southern colonies. 



TJie Tradition of Education. 



225 



XII. 

In New England the Latin school found an en- 
vironment distinctly more friendly than was that of 
the colonies to the southward. The settlers were 
in the first freshness of their Utopian enthusiasm, 
and their church establishment was the very heart 
of their enterprise. In the Puritan mind preaching 
was really a sacrament above sacraments, though it 
was called " an ordinance." God was held to be 
present " in his holy ordinances " when they had 
" binn setled in a way of gospel order," It became 
therefore a matter of primary importance to edu- 
cate preachers. For ages preparation for the min- 
istry had consisted mainly in acquiring a knowledge 
of Latin, the sacred tongue of Western Christen- 
dom. Though the Latin service was no longer 
used by Protestants, and the Vulgate Bible had 
been dethroned by the original text, and though 
the main stream of English theology was by this 
time flowing in the channel of the mother tongue, 
the notion that all ministers should know Latin had 
still some centuries of tough life in it. The first 
professed aim of university and secondary educa- 
tion in that time was to raise up ministers ; to fit 
men for the service of the state followed close after. 
In all early projects for schools and colleges in 
America these two were somewhat grotesquely 
intertwined, with a notion that a first step toward 
converting the heathen tribes was to make some of 
them bachelors of art. For this purpose the en- 



Chap. V. 



Latin 

schools in 

New 

England. 



Mass. 
Records, 
May, 1671. 



226 



The Transit of Civilization. 



dowment of the abortive Henrico College was 
undertaken in Virginia, and in 1666, after no little 
travail, Harvard succeeded in graduating an In- 
dian. 

XIII. 

The English liking for free grammar schools, 
re-enforced by the Puritan passion for securing 
" teaching elders," caused Latin schools to be set 
up in many places "for the better trayning vpp of 
youth, . . . and that through God's blessing they 
may be fitted for publique service hereafter either 
in church or commonweale." The ancient English 
cow-and-calf endowment of education, which had 
been already introduced into Virginia, reappears 
in the Northern colonies. Of the many plans trace- 
able in early New England, it is probable that 
nearly all had English precedents. In New Haven, 
Boston, Newport, and elsewhere one finds early 
proposals to sustain schools by the rental or usu- 
fruct of town lands, a method used in England and 
incorporated in grants to early Virginia planta- 
tions. John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, had 
been a grammar-school usher in England, and his 
parish in Roxbury appears to have contemplated a 
free school as early as 1642, in which year ten shil- 
lings of rental was bequeathed toward its support. 
In 1645 all the householders in Roxbury made a 
perpetual annual subscription, amounting in all to 
twenty pounds a year, to sustain a free school for 
their children, " to fitt them for publike service 



The Tradition of Education. 



227 



both in churche and Commonwealthe." These 
rentals were made a lien on " not only their houses, 
but also their yardes, orchards, gardenings, out- 
houses, and homesteads." The few resources of a 
new country for a fixed income were probabl}'^ all 
tried in turn by founders of New England schools. 
One finds among other things the rent of a ferry, 
of a wharf, of a shop, of a house, and of a gristmill 
devoted to education. The early Virginia tenant 
and servant endowment finds something like a par- 
allel in the contribution to Harvard College of a 
hundred and fifty pounds, apparently out of a fund 
produced by the sale of indigent children sent out 
of England as apprentices. After trying other 
means, deficiencies were made up in some towns 
by a tax rate, and this method of sustaining town 
schools proved the most practicable and developed 
after generations into the modern system. In some 
New England communities the school tax was levied 
at first on schoolable children in the several fami- 
lies ; often the rate was shared between property 
and progeny. In all these expedients there ap- 
pears to be a resort to methods known in England. 



XIV. 

The zeal for schools was somewhat more effect- 
ive in New England than in the colonies farther 
south, because the communities were more com- 
pact and the local governments more vigorous. 
But it was also probably more effective, because 



Chap. V. 

Winthrop, 

ii, 264. 

Mass. 

Records, 

passim. 

Ellis's 

Roxbury 

Town, 

chap. iv. 



Mass. 
Rec, 13, 
Nov., 1644. 
Quincy's 
Harvard 
Coll., i, 
473- 



The 
religious \ 



228 



The Transit of Civilizatio7i. 



the main body of the people was religious, and 
schools in the seventeenth century were a part of 
the religious establishment. This trait education 
had inherited from the ages preceding. In some 
way even rough and rudimentary education took 
on a religious color in the eyes of the people of 
that day. Massachusetts ordained in 1642 that 
every child should be taught enough " to read 
and understand the principles of religion & the 
capitall lawes of the country," The preamble of 
the Massachusetts school law of 1647 makes it the 
motive of the act to thwart " the ould deluder 
Satan " by keeping the Scriptures accessible in 
the original tongues, that " the true Sence and 
meaning " might not " be clouded by false glosses 
of saint seeming deceivers." This law passed into 
the Connecticut code of 1650, preceded by this 
preamble with its uncouth rhetoric ; the old de- 
luder Satan still marches at the front, followed by 
the Papists, the saint-seeming deceivers walking 
softly in the rear, " false glosses " in hand. The 
broad and secular uses of education were not rec- 
ognized as yet. 

XV. 

By this curious law of 1647 the Puritan gov- 
ernment of Massachusetts rendered probably its 
greatest service to the future. The act was not 
modern in aim, and for a long time it was ineffi- 
cient, but from that quaint act there has been 
slowly evolved the school system that now ob- 



The Tradition of Education. 



229 



tains in the United States. The rush of Puritan 
immigration had virtually ceased about 1640, and 
the attention of the New England leaders was 
turned toward the thronging children in the pro- 
lific families of the settlers. The religious Utopia, 
such as the founders had imagined when they heard 
the voice of the Lord calling upon them to arise 
and depart out of the land of their fathers, was to 
be realized by the children born in " these ends of 
the earth." As early as 1642 there was alarm at 
the educational decline. Before 1645 there were 
agitations in favor of free schools in New Haven, 
Dedham, Roxbury, and other towns. In 1644 the 
Commissioners of the United Colonies of New 
England bestirred themselves to collect a peck of 
corn from each family for Harvard College, that 
the supply of preachers might not fail. But the 
graduates of Harvard were now finding benefices 
in England, where, since the rise of the Puritans 
to power, ministers with Puritan antecedents were 
much sought after. In 1646 the Massachusetts 
General Court sadly confesses " the fewness of 
persons accomplished to such imployments" as 
required education, and looks to the future with 
something like consternation. Six years later the 
records testify that Harvard students " as soone as 
they are growne vpp, ready for public vse . . . 
leave the country." Meantime " the first found- 
ers weare away apace." It was in the face of 
this disheartening exigency that the school law of 
1647 was adopted. 



Chap. V. 



Mass. 

Records, 

1652, 



230 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Theschool 
law of 
1647. 



XVI. 

This law, which has produced such far-reach- 
ing and unforeseen results, was confessedly a dam 
against the rising tide of ignorance. It was 
passed *' that learning may not be buried in the 
grave of our fathers in the church and common- 
wealth." It ordained " that every township in this 
iurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to 
the number of fifty householders, shall then forth- 
with appointe one within their towne to teach to 
write and to reade." This ungrammatical sentence 
is the vital part of the law. Towns having a hun- 
dred householders were to establish grammar 
schools to teach Latin, or to pay a fine to the near- 
est towns having such a school. This provision for 
grammar schools, as the preamble implies, was in- 
tended to be the capital feature of the law, but it 
could not be enforced. On the other hand, the 
rude little schools for mere reading and writing, 
to be taught usually by some resident farmer, were 
possible in a new country, and they were realized 
in many townships during the next half century. 
Those country schools that pretended to the dig- 
nity of grammar schools were most of them shams 
or makeshifts to satisfy the law by such devices as 
covenanting that an incompetent master should 
teach Latin "as far as he was able," or that he 
should " teach English and carry them on in Latin 
as far as he could." Even where the teacher was 
fairly competent those desiring Latin came to be 



TJie Tradition of Education. 



231 



distressingly few. In the matter of rudimentary 
schools a law could not achieve much. Townships 
might have something less than fifty householders 
with perhaps a hundred and fifty children, and yet 
have no school. One school in a territory of six 
or eight miles square was but a lean provision. 
Considering the number of voluntary schools al- 
ready in existence the first effect of the law must 
have been slight indeed. Popular education under 
its provisions was rough and scant, as the surviv- 
ing documents of the succeeding age testify all 
unconsciously. No new kind of school was intro- 
duced- by the act, and the question of support was 
still left with each township, " as the maior part of 
those that order the prudentials of the towne shall 
appoint." Its importance lay in the requirement 
by a central authority that each local community 
of a certain population should sustain a school in 
some way, and its historical value consists in the 
principle thus established. The outcome of this 
law adopted, in what was the most religious as it 
was the most intolerant period of New England 
history, has been the development of a national 
system of secular education for many millions of 
children professing nearly every creed known in 
the wide world. 

XVII. 

In human history nothing is educed from noth- 
ing ; that which is exists by virtue of far-reaching 

roots struck deep into the mold of that which was. 
16 



Chap. V. 



Note 20. 



Origin of 
the Massa- 
chusetts 
school 
system. 



232 



The Transit of Cimlization. 



Pioneers especially have no time to invent ; neces- 
sity rarely brings forth anything better than imita- 
tion and adaptation. What makes the school act 
of 1647 of consequence is the legal obligation im- 
posed on local communities to provide opportunity 
for education. For this England afforded no ex- 
ample. But New England was quite as likely to 
fetch a precedent from some Presbyterian country 
as to follow the tradition of England. She did not 
need to go farther than to Scotland. At the Ref- 
ormation Knox desired " to purge the Churche of 
God from all superstition " and to disseminate the 
new doctrines in the remotest corners of Scotland. 
In his Buke of Discipline he demanded " That 
everie severall churche have a schoolmaister ap- 
pointed, such a one as is able at least to teach 
Grammar and the Latin tung, yf the Town be of 
any reputation. Yf it be upaland . . . then must 
either the Reider or the Minister take cayre over 
the children ... to instruct them in their first rudi- 
mentie and especially in the catechisme." Knox 
proposed this system sixty-seven years before the 
law of 1647 ; in both we have the same Latin schools 
in larger towns and rudimentary teaching in ob- 
scurer places. The Synod of Dort repeated the at- 
tempt in Holland in 161 8. Knox's scheme and the 
Dutch imitation of it were but an expansion of the 
parish and cathedral schools existing for centuries 
before. 



The Tradition of Education. 



233 



XVIII. 

The educational decline in all the colonies was 
inevitable and it was universal as we may see by 
the extant letters, wills, and records painfully writ- 
ten by men of the second and third generations. 
The violent aberrations of orthography from even 
the rather free standards of the time, the vagrant 
capital letters, the halting and confused march of 
sentences, suggest that brains, as well as hands, 
were numbed by the rude toil from which pioneers 
may not escape. The trees of the forest were a 
hostile phalanx to be broken, fields beset with 
stumps that defied the plow were to be subdued 
to culture ; there were savages to fight and to flee 
from, towns and ships to build, with tasks of Her- 
cules beside that left small room for learning. 
Frontiersmen find the Latin accidence dispensable. 
The generations of bad spellers and clumsy writers 
born to a new-world battle were much better trained 
for their environment than the most accomplished 
of the first comers. They had learned from boy- 
hood to take bearings and lay a true course through 
labyrinthine woods, to handle with steady sureness 
the heavy firelock musket or the newer snaphance, 
and the long-barreled fowling piece, to swing true 
the felling axe, and to wield the heavy beetle, to 
hew a puncheon floor, to build a cabin of rough 
logs. They could balance and paddle on salt 
water and fresh in wind and wild weather the 
tottling canoe. Patience, courage, enterprise, and 



Chap. V. 



The 

decline in 
education. 



234 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



a nimble mental shiftiness could not but result 
from such a curriculum. But these men hardly 
knew more of literature than did the Greek heroes 
or the Hebrew patriarchs. In the rather well- 
written manuscript records of Virginia parishes of 
that time " the clarkes " record that the vestry 
" has made choyse on " one R. M. for a church 
warden; that the parson has "affeciated"; that A. B. 
has been " opoynted overseyear " of the highways ; 
processioning of bounds is spelled " persestioning," 
sufficient is "sofitiant," and so on. It is entered 
that a certain person has been " making his redress 
to this vestry for helpe." A Maryland vestry 
clerk had no notion of mental reservation ; he re- 
cords that the vestrymen took the oath of abju- 
ration " without equivocation or governmental! 
reservation." In New England it is amusingly 
pathetic to read the records of covenants with 
teachers written by town clerks who doubled the 
n in English or stipulated that the pupils should , 
learn to "rite" or "wright." The awkward pro-™ 
nunciation of the pioneer scribe shows through his 
phonetic spelling when those to be taught appear 
as "childeringe," and one of the three r's in a con- 
tract with a teacher is sometimes " refmetick," 
sometimes " retmitick." Even the Boston clerk of 
1652 bewrays his speech when he writes of the 
" pore scollers of Hervert College." Local gov- 
ernment has its petty side ; the New England 
towns had " tricks and shifts to evade the school 
laws." Few towns escaped fine for neglect of 



The Tradition of Edtication. 



235 



school laws in those days. In some of the towns 
there were children that traveled long roads to 
school ; in one case it was eight miles. In New 
England, as in Virginia, many children learned to 
read in the old English way by home instruction. 
In Virginia the ability to read was perhaps about 
as common as in England at the same period, but 
there are cases of a man holding local office who 
was obliged to make his " signum " or mark in 
subscribing to a document ; in Andover, Mass., 
in 1664, five out of eleven on a coroner's jury 
made marks. In other colonies than Massachu- 
setts, Connecticut, and Virginia there was yet 
greater illiteracy. In Maryland half the adult 
males were probably unable to write their names 
during the whole seventeenth century. Harvard 
College ran down in the general decline. " The 
greater part of the people were devoted to the 
Plow," as a writer of the time explains, and " learn- 
ing was forced to plod out a way to live." In the 
last quarter of the seventeenth century Harvard 
was a Latin and divinity school, slim in attendance, 
and inefficient in teaching, while it was kicked 
about as a political football in the strife between 
the factions of the Mathers and their rivals. 



XIX. 

Through all this period of darkness and de- 
cline the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut, and in a less degree the other New England 



Chap. V. 

Shepard, 

1672, and 

Ransom, 

1709, in L. 

Swift on 

Election 

Sermons. 

Lincoln's 

Worcester, 

248. 



Bailey's 

Andover, 

144. 

Note 22. 



Compare 

Quincy's 

Hist. 

Harvard, 

passim, 

and 

Danker's 

Journal, 

3S4, 385. 

Note 23. 



Decline of 
the Latin 
school. 



236 



The Transit of Civilization. 



governments, except Rhode Island, preserved in 
form and something more that which has proved 
an invaluable legacy for the future — a system of 
schools sustained in part by enforced local taxa- 
tion. The school that survived "the dark ages" 
of New^ England was no longer that brought 
from England. Supported partly by town rates 
the so-called Latin school was less able even 
than the English school to resist the intrusion of 
younger children. Such pupils gave trouble at 
Harvard, and at New Haven they " bothered the 
master of the grammar school by learning to spell 
English." Yielding to the demand of supporters, 
grammar schools came to give more attention to 
writing and arithmetic. But this innovation was 
admitted grudgingly at first. " It is scarce known 
in any place to have a free school for English and 
writing " was the objection raised in New Haven, 
but even New Haven only grumbled in yielding, 
and so by slow degrees it came to pass that the 
English studies at last drove the sacred Latin from 
the free school founded at first for it alone. In 
vain did the town meeting exhort the master to 
" bring his boys on to latting as fast as they were 
capable." Latin teaching barely survived at alli 
by the aid of such hortation and of repeated 
legislation, local and general. Other important] 
changes came by the irresistible pressure of cir- 
cumstances. The remoter townsmen were tax- 
payers also, and they tired of sending their chil- 
dren over weary miles of snowdrifts to the town- 



The Tradition of Education. 



237 



ship schools or of teaching them at home. Thus 
as time went on " outskirt schools " grew up. In 
many cases, over the whole region covered by 
township communities the schools were rotated 
so as to be kept first in one neighborhood and 
then in another. In the eighteenth century we 
find New Jersey appointing men to look after 
the schools, and see that they rotated properly, so 
that all the inhabitants might have a fair chance. 
By such processes the town school gradually be- 
came the modern district school. An obligation 
to establish and to support schools, in part at least, 
from the public fund having once become tradi- 
tional, one finds in the eighteenth century even 
dame schools and many writing schools main- 
tained in part or wholly at public expense. Taking 
our stand at the point where the half-mediaeval 
seventeenth gives place to the far more modern 
eighteenth century, we can see that the thousand- 
year-old exclusive instruction of the few was in 
process of slow transformation into a scheme of 
popular and universal education. As usual in 
such a metamorphosis, the change was made by 
insensible gradations ; the continuity was without 
apparent seam. 

XX. 

No such thing as public education not domi- 
nated by religion was known in the seventeenth 
century. From dame school to university all was 
ostensibly, perhaps ostentatiously, religious. In 



Chap. V. 

Lincoln's 

Worcester, 

249. 

Comp. 
Bailey's 
Andover, 
519- 



Budd, in 

Go wan, \ 

102, note. 



Temple's 

North 

Brookfield, 

200. Judd's 

Hadley, 

65. Boston 

Town 

Records, 

passim. 



Maryland 
and Rhode 
Island. 

Note 24. 



238 



The Transit of Civilization. 



such a state of society, governments freely toler- 
ating more than one form of religious belief could 
do little or nothing by state initiative for educa- 
tion ; and in communities where there was a divi- 
sion of sentiment voluntary co-operation in schools 
was almost impossible. In Maryland the poor 
little arts of reading and writing were hardly 
known in some parts of the province, and it has 
been estimated that in the seventeenth centur)- 
half of the adult males were unable to write their 
names. There were efforts to establish schools in 
the lifetime of the first generation ; these were 
kept by one Ralphe Crouch, who was in some 
way connected with the Jesuits. Thirty-seven 
years after the first settlement the Catholic upper 
House of the Legislature proposed to found a gov- 
ernment school, but the Protestant lower House 
promptly barricaded the way by proposing as a 
condition that all the teachers should be Protes- 
tants or that there should be at least one Protes- 
tant master in the school. The notion of a wholly 
secular and impartial rudimentary instruction had 
not entered the minds of men in any part of Chris- 
tendom. One of those "schools for humanities" 
for which the Jesuit order was famous was begun 
"in the center of the country" in 1677, but with- 
out aid from the Maryland government. Rhode 
Island was similarly embarrassed, and there is no 
mention of schools in the early colony records. 
There were schools nevertheless. The early New 
England system of town schools came into Rhode 



The Tradition of Education. 



239 



Island by induction. Bristol, in 1682, established 
a school by dividing the expense between the 
parents of the pupils and the taxpayers, a method 
common in the adjacent colonies. But a retarda- 
tion of educational development was the natural 
penalty of religious impartiality. One of the re- 
sults of the English Revolution of 1688 was to 
make Maryland for a while a crown colony and 
rather intensely Protestant. In 1692 and in years 
following laws were passed for the promotion of 
" free schools " of the old Latin school kind, in- 
tended to produce candidates for holy orders who 
were to complete their training at the new College 
of William and Mary in Virginia, 



XXI. 

By comparison of sucb notices as we have 
of American schools with the English schools of 
the period, we can form a fairly clear conception 
of the outward traits of school life in the age 
of American settlement. We ma}' dimly see the 
unwilling boy " with shining morning face " and a 
lambskin satchel setting out for school, breakfast- 
less, in the dark winter mornings in time to begin 
his studies at the unchristian hour of six o'clock. 
Some schools postponed the hour of beginning 
until seven. The session ended at eleven, when 
the famished pupils went home to their first meal, 
though in a few schools there was a recess of fif- 
teen minutes at nine o'clock, in order that those 



Chap. V. 

Johnson's 
Higher 
Ed'n in 
R. I.,p.2i. 



Bacon's 
Laws, 
i692-'94, 
xxxi ; 1696, 
xvii ; 1699, 
xvi ; 1704, 
xxvii. 



MS. Brit. 
Mus. H., 
"5- 



School and 
breakfast. 



240 



The Transit of Civilization. 



who lived near the school might snatch a hurried 
breakfast, a meal not generally reckoned with at 
that time. There was a custom in earlier times 
of allowing the fasting pupils to take some light 
food in school with bottles of drink, but if the cus- 
tom survived into the seventeenth century it left 
no trace in educational literature. The session was 
resumed for the afternoon when the master rapped 
on the doorpost at one o'clock, and it continued 
until " well-nigh six at night," when the scholars, 
who must have been stupefied by an all-day con- 
finement, heard the welcome word of dismission, 
" Exeatis." In a new country the rough roads and 
long distances must have made it next to impos- 
sible to begin in the dark at six in the winter. 
By 1 7 19 the hour had fallen away in one place to 
" three quarters past seven." One finds the pupils 
of Christopher Dock, the Pennsylvania Dutch 
teacher, munching their " breakfast bread " along 
the road as they hurried to school at some un- 
earthly time, and back-country schools in America 
retained cruelly long hours, with other cherished 
and venerable abuses brought from Europe, until 
the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early 
years of Harvard an hour was allowed at some 
time in the middle of the forenoon for morning! 
bever, a light snack preceded by no breakfast.] 
Half an hour was given to the afternoon bever,, 
and an hour and a half each to dinner and sup- 
per. Small allowance was made for the activity 
of youth. There were no regular recesses for play] 



The Tradition of Education. 



241 



in any of the schools. On occasion a great man 
would lend his countenance to the school by a 
formal visit ; at such a time he might crave a little 
grace for the prisoners of learning ; a half holiday 
was granted at his request and in honor of his ad- 
vent. Such playtimes were of old called " reme- 
dyes," but austere Dean Colet would not allow to 
the pupils of his new foundation of St. Paul's a 
playday at the request of anybody less than a king 
or a prelate. It was thought best to cut off this 
ancient privilege wholly at the little Virginia col- 
lege; there were probably too many visitors of dis- 
tinction ; but one afternoon a month was set apart 
for play, and whenever a new student was enrolled 
"an afternoon extraordinary" was granted, " and 
no more." 

XXII. 

On a certain day in 1563, during the prevalence 
of " the fever pestilence " in London, there sat at 
dinner in Secretary Cecil's chamber at Windsor 
Castle a group of distinguished men. Cecil turned 
the table talk to the recent flight of some lads 
from the neighboring school of Eton " for fear of 
beating," and condemned the harshness of school- 
masters. There were in the company of course 
some of those conservatives who rise up to de- 
fend any old-fashioned practice. But, as good luck 
would have it, there sat among the dignitaries of 
state Roger Ascham, the archery - loving, cock- 
fighting, learned and gifted schoolmaster, who 



Chap. V. 

Quincy's 
Harvard, 
i, 517- 



Statutes, 
Knight's 
Colet, 308. 



Ludwell 
MSS., i, p. 
I. Comp. 
D'Ewes's 
Autobiog., 
i, 142. 



Ascham 

and 

reform. 



242 



The Transit of Civilization. 



had come to Windsor that day to read in Greek 
with the young Queen Elizabeth one of the ora- 
tions of Demosthenes. Without title or political 
position it is fair to suppose that he sat far down 
near the foot of the table ; but Cecil encouraged 
him to speak to the question, and Ascham gave 
his opinion strongly and no doubt eloquently 
against the barbarity of schoolmasters. Dinner 
ended, Sir Richard Sackville, who had held his 
peace while the debate went on, led Ascham 
away to a window for private speech with him. 
Sackville confessed to Ascham that the beatings 
of a " lewde Schoolmaster" had brought him to 
hate learning before he was fourteen years old. 
He entreated the queen's schoolmaster to write 
out what he had just spoken at the table. By 
this conversation Ascham was set on writing his 
famous work The Scholemaster. But neither the 
authority of Ascham nor of any other could at 
once abate the unsparing severity of school dis- 
cipline which was popularly believed to be emi- 
nently beneficial to boys and of scriptural author- 
ity. Thomas Becon, the reformer, had complained 
that schoolmasters beat their pupils " like stock- 
fishes." Mulcaster, the successor of Ascham, had 
no hesitation about flogging ; he speaks somewhat 
gayly of " my lady birchely." Brinsley, the able 
and zealous advocate of school reform in the 
reign of James I, suggests several practical ways 
of avoiding brutal punishments, such as the use 
of rewards, and the keeping of a "black bill," or, 



The Tradition of Educatioji. 



243 



as we should now say, a black list; the unlucky 
scholars set down in this list were to be deprived 
of their rare playtimes. But even the humane 
Brinsley did not once dream of sparing the rod 
for serious offenders; he thought " ferula" a neces- 
sary remedy for bad Latin, and he used what he 
calls " little ierkes " with a small switch of " red 
willow." When little jerks with little switches 
would not serve, he recommends more serious 
flogging ; the young rebel to be held over a form 
or up against a post " by three or four of his fel- 
lows," making sure " to hold him fast as they are 
enforced to do who are to shove or tame an 
vnbroken colt." This was the method of a con- 
scientious and humane master ; the brutalities of 
the unfeeling are not pleasant to imagine. There 
were others than Sir Richard Sackville who cursed 
some " lewde schoolmaster" for a failure to get 
learning, and some who attributed deafness to 
blows received in school. " It's a general plague 
and complaint of the whole land," writes Peacham, 
" that for one discreet and able teacher you shall 
find twenty ignorant and carelesse." The first 
master at Harvard went too far even for that 
age ; it is not certain that he would have been 
dismissed for his barbarous punishment of stu- 
dents and the exceedingly short commons on 
which he fed them, but when he ferociously 
drubbed even his usher, beating him mercilessly 
with a hickory stick while two of his servants 
held the man fast, he lost his place, and set on 



Chap. V. 



Ludus 
Literarius, 
passim. 
Comp. 
D'Ewes, i, 
63, 64. 



Brinsley's 
Consola- 
tions for 
Our Gram- 
mar 

Schooles, 
P- 43- 

In Com- 
pleat Gen- 
tleman, 
1660. 



244 



The Transit of Civilization. 



foot a reform in college discipline. A law was 
made limiting the punishment of students. If a 
student were not yet " adultus " he might get ten 
stripes for each offense. This was very mild ; at 
Eton fifty-three stripes are recorded as given for 
a trivial fault at an earlier period, and the young 
John Milton had to suffer a beating from his tutor 
at Cambridge not very long before this. At Har- 
vard an older student was not to be beaten at all. 



XXIII. 

Sometimes, though rarely, such a phrase as 
" male childeringe " appears in a contract with a 
teacher, but it was always understood that chil- 
dren were boys only, girls did not count. There 
were no girls in the schools sustained by towns 
or by endowment at the period of American set- 
tlement. To read her Bible and psalm-book de- 
voutly and to use her needle deftly were the only 
necessary accomplishments for a woman, and these 
could be got in a dame school or at home. The 
illiterate " her mark " is signed to papers in the 
probate office by many women whose fathers were 
men of education. " Probably not one woman in 
a dozen could write," says a well-informed Newt 
England antiquary. In England only "the first 
elementarie" was taught to a girl, and Governor! 
Winthrop was convinced that much learning wasj 
dangerous to a woman's wits. The education of! 
the most favored girl ceased at thirteen or four- 



The Tradition of Education. 



245 



teen, at which age she began to assume the respon- 
sibilities of a young woman and to blossom into a 
waiting- candidate for wifehood. 



XXIV. 

An English writer recommends the middle of 
the day for teaching writing, because the fingers 
would then be warmer and nimbler, which sug- 
gests schoolrooms with no fire. In New England 
one finds the summer school sometimes kept in 
" the unfinished room " of a house which is spoken 
of as though a room unfinished was a normal part 
of a new-country house. The kitchen of a dwell- 
ing, with its great fireplace, was sometimes made a 
schoolroom in winter, or in its stead the "parlor"; 
the best room reserved for weddings and funerals, 
on which occasions the bare floor would be neatly 
strewn with sand. Even where there was a school- 
house, as at Dedham in 1658, the schoolmaster was 
allowed to assemble the school in his own house 
" if the weather be extreme and unfit to travaill." 
In that climate there early grew up a custom of 
exacting a half cord or a " wayne load of wood for 
fewell" for each pupil. This was to be delivered 
at the schoolhouse in November, for no man of 
English origin in the first two or three generations 
after settlement knew that wood could be drawn 
much more easily on sleds over the snow. 



Chap. V. 



Traits of 
schools. 



246 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



XXV. 

The direct influence in America of the advanced 
education of the seventeenth century was not great. 
No one with any sense of historic perspective will 
believe that the university men who lived or so- 
journed in Virginia in the early seventeenth centu- 
ry had any traceable relation to the group of Vir- 
ginia statesmen that grew as from a congenial soil 
in the later eighteenth ; it is equally fanciful to 
suppose that the existence of a considerable body 
of Cambridge men in early New England had any- 
thing to do with producing the literary forwardness 
of that region two hundred years later. But the 
university ideals of the time influenced directly the 
course of thought in the new pi'ovinces. Logic was 
the main study in all higher institutions, and the 
logic bequeathed by the schoolmen meant merely 
incessant practice of the art of dialectical disputa- 
tion as a means of acquiring universal truth. In 
sermons and in conversation this verbal sword play 
was much affected and it rendered the wits nimble. 
But this highly valued " Aristotelian method " had 
for ages retarded the advance toward larger learn- 
ing and broader views. Milton's disappointment 
in the university was great, and his contempt for 
its studies is delightfully Miltonic if not always dis- 
criminating. In his vehement complaint he ran- 
sacks "lofts of piled thunder" for missiles withj 
which to assail the curriculum of his time. It is] 
" a pure trifling at grammar and sophistry," " anj 



The Tradition of Education. 



247 



asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles " ; the 
students are " mocked and deluded " " with ragged 
notions and babblements while they expect worthy 
and delightful knowledge." The universities in 
his opinion were " not yet well recovered from the 
scholastic grossness of the barbaric ages." There 
were university students of sound intellectual ap- 
petite, like Milton himself, who contrived to find 
fruit in fields set thick with the sow thistles of 
scholastic logic and the brambles of mediceval 
metaphysics. Others, on being abruptly thrust at 
fifteen years of age into these studies, took " such a 
distaste of what seemed to them a mere rattle of 
words, that they were very slowly, if ever, recon- 
ciled." 

XXVI. 

In 1636 the Massachusetts General Court voted 
two hundred pounds toward "a schoole or col- 
ledge," and the next year selected Newton, the 
present Cambridge, as the place for it. This prop- 
osition might have proved as futile as the early 
proposals for a college in Virginia had it not been 
that John Harvard, a minister, dying in 1638, left a 
legacy for the proposed institution which thus had 
the breath of life breathed into it and became Har- 
vard College. It was established on the most re- 
ligious plan possible. The study of divinity was 
made the chief end of a student, prayer and religious 
consecration were prescribed academic duties ; Bible 
reading twice a day and the faithful reporting of 
17 



Chap. V. 



Note 30. 



Lives of 
the Norths, 
iii, 283. 



Harvard 
College. 



Quincy's 
History of 
Harvard 
College, i, 
515, 517- 



248 



The Transit of Civilization. 



sermons were enjoined. The test for the first de- 
gree was a student's ability to render the Old and 
New Testaments out of Hebrew and Greek into 
Latin " and to resolve them logically." For the 
second degree a summary knowledge of logic, nat- 
ural and moral philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, 
and astronomy were added. There was here a 
slender recognition of mathematics in advance of 
the English universities. The modes of study seem 
to have been mechanical after the manner of the 
time. In the earlier years of the college each stu- 
dent was accustomed to transcribe for himself cer- 
tain treatises in manuscript on logic and other 
studies made by Alexander Richardson of Oxford. 
In examining the list of subjects for graduating 
theses we are now and then refreshed by the in- 
trusion of a question that has to do with human 
progress ; the question of the circulation of the 
blood was discussed in 1660, and was again mooted 
in 1699, more than seventy years after Harvey 
had announced his discovery. For the most 
part the themes with which college graduates 
in that day busied themselves are grotesquel)'- 
futile as, " whether privation is the cause of 
anything in Nature," " whether genus exists out- 
side of intellect," and " whether a shadow moves." 
Behold philosophy ! It was proved at Harvard 
commencements by reasoners with youth and cour- 
age on their side that the starry heaven is made 
of fire ; that there is a stone which produces gold ; 
and that the quadrature of the circle is possible. 



The Tradition of Education. 



249 



The lawfulness and the possibility of curing 
wounds by sympathetic powder excited attention 
just before and after 1700, and the existence of a 
universal remedy was a question equally belated 
in agitating scholastic minds in America. We 
have in these questions the everlasting mark-time 
of mediaeval philosoph}^ marching ostentatiously, 
but never moving out of its tracks. 



XXVII. 

After the Restoration Virginia began to feel an 
alarm like that which had startled Massachusetts 
earlier. It is probable that the deprived church- 
men who occupied Virginia parishes during the 
Commonwealth were now returning to England 
to reap the reward of their fidelity to the king. 
It was feared that the " want of able & faithful 
Ministers" would deprive the colonists of ''those 
great Blessings and Mercies that allwaies attend 
upon the Service of God," and the Assembly 
passed an act in 1661, and again in 1662, to found 
" a coUedge and free schoole." But Sir William 
Berkeley, the governor, did not want either a col- 
lege or a free school, and Berkeley, with a salary 
independent of the good will of the people, was 
more absolute in Virginia than his master Charles 
was in England. This pinchbeck Stuart detested 
ministers who were able to preach, and he abhorred 
printing presses. But the Virginia educational 
movement at the time of the Restoration was not 



Chap. V. 



Young's 
Subjects for 
the Mas- 
ter's De- 
gree at 
Harvard, 
pamphlet. 



■William 
and Mary 
College. 



Purvis's 
Laws of 
Va., 1662. 
Comp. 
Hening, 
1661 and 
1662, pp. 
25i 56. 



250 



The Transit of Civilization. 



wholly without result. If the proposed subscrip- 
tion for the college was ever taken, it probably was 
not collected, and the " houseing " ordered to be 
erected for the college is not again heard of. But 
at least two bequests to found new free schools 
were made in Berkeley's depressing reign. After 
the disorders and despotisms which followed the 
failure of Nathaniel Bacon's bold stroke for free- 
dom in 1676 had passed away, a college subscrip- 
tion was set on foot in 1688 and 1689, and sums 
amounting to twenty-five hundred pounds were 
promised by wealthy Virginians and a few English 
merchants. The confusion resulting from the Eng- 
lish Revolution of 1688 probably caused delay. 
Two years more elapsed before the Assembly took 
action by ordaining an institution in three depart- 
ments — a grammar school, a school of philosophy, 
and a school of Oriental languages and divinity. 
A charter was secured from the sovereigns. Wil- 
liam and Mary, whose names the college took, 
gave freely out of the wild lands of the province, 
out of the royal revenues from tobacco, and gave 
outright the income from the fees for surveying 
land. The Virginia Assembly added an import 
duty on furs. In 1700, while the building designed 
by Sir Christopher Wren was yet unfinished, the 
college at the close of its first year held a commence- 
ment. The novelty of such an exercise attracted 
a large concourse of people to the new town of 
Williamsburg. Some of the great planters came 
in coaches, which vehicles were yet rare enough 



I 



TJie Tradition of Education. 



251 



in America to be noticeable. Other visitors ar- 
rived in their own sloops, sailing in some instances 
from the upper waters of the Chesapeake, and in 
other cases on the open ocean from Pennsylvania 
and New York. Some even of the Indians gath- 
ered their blankets round them and strolled into 
the little capital to lend picturesqueness to this 
powwow of white men. The opening of an infant 
college was a notable break in the rather eventless 
monotony of a half-settled coast, remote from the 
great world. y 

The so-called college, thus hopefully launched, 
drifted inevitably into the whirlpools and eddies of 
petty provincial politics ; its revenues <vere a tempt- 
ing bait to the ring of predatory colonial magnates 
and ambitious sycophants that surrounded a royal 
governor in that day. William and Mary College 
was but a grammar school for years after its start, 
and its development was tediously slow. But most 
of its resources were saved from plunder and 
waste, and at the outbreak of the Revolution it 
was said to be the richest institution of learning 
in America — for all of which it was primarily in- 
debted to a single man. 



XXVITI. 

While Scottish example, as we have conjec- 
tured, had its influence in the founding of Harvard, 
the influence was more direct in Virginia, where 
the final success of the college was due to a Scotch- 



Chap. V. 



Charles 
Campbell's 
Hist, of 
Virginia, 
361, 362. 



Compare 
Hugh 
Jones's 
Present 
State of 
Va., 1724, 
83, 84. 



252 



The Transit of Civilization. 



man. Behind the measures taken to advance the 
project by the Assembly and governor in Virginia, 
by the king and queen, by the Primate and the 
Bishop of London, by Locke the philosopher, and 
by the executors of Robert Boyle, there is the 
moving hand of James Blair, one of the most perti- 
nacious men ever born in a land of obstinate perti- 
nacity. Having seen the subscription well made 
up in Virginia, Blair went to England in 1691 with 
a commission from the Assembly to procure the 
best charter possible and a royal endowment. The 
traditions of the court were dead against him. The 
government of Charles II had made a point of dis- 
couraging in Virginia printing presses, education, 
and other influences that unfit people for docile 
submission to tyranny. The colony was to buy 
English wares, to swell the customs revenues by 
producing the heavily taxed tobacco, and to buy 
negroes from the Royal African Company, in 
which not only great courtiers but royalty itself 
had held shares. When Blair argued the need of 
a college for the sake of the souls of the people, 
Seymour, the attorney general, replied contemptu- 
ously, " Damn your souls, make tobacco ! " A less 
contentious man than Blair would have given up 
and gone home, a man less canny and persistent 
must have failed. He contrived to secure William's' 
attention in the midst of the exigent affairs of a crit- 
ical time, and he managed to gain the support of 
both the sovereigns. His manoeuvres were worthy 
of an expert courtier; he played Archbishop Ten- 



The Tradition of Educatioti. 



253 



nison and the Bishop of London and Queen Mary 
herself with skill, and won his suit handsomely. 
He carried back a charter for a sttidiiivi generale, 
a place of universal study. After his return he 
fought triumphantly with petty courtiers and suc- 
cessive governors, breaking Sir Edmund Andros 
himself, who had contrived to survive for many 
years the infamy of a great variety of disgraceful 
conduct in his various governments. Dr. Blair 
was a man of versatile ability ; his printed ser- 
mons passed through several editions, and he held 
his place as bishop's commissary at the head of the 
Virginia clergy for half a century. His discipline 
was mild, and he fought the battles of his order 
against encroachments, but his clergy disliked and 
opposed him. He resisted the oppressions of the 
royal governors, but the people were never at- 
tracted to him. He had no arts of conciliation, 
and he had no lubricating humor. He delighted 
to carry a measure by mere push of pike, and to 
his contemporaries he was a bundle of pugnacities. 
Every man born north of the Tweed was an object 
of prejudice, and Blair was accused, moreover, of 
having received nothing better than a Presbyterian 
ordination. Though no one seems to have ques- 
tioned his honesty, it was complained that he " had 
large worldly concerns." He lived to an advanced 
age, and died rich in a land where many thriftless 
and often dissipated parsons got on but meanly. 
He was one of the chief benefactors of a colony 
that never showed him, young or old, living or 



Chap. V. 



254 



The Transit of Civilization. 



dead, the slightest gratitude of which there is any 
record. A single noble legacy made the obscure 
John Harvard immortal, but fifty years of resolute 
service and a liberal legacy to the college brought 
no honors to the founder of William and Mary. A 
good and public-spirited man, he was personally 
unlikable. But had Blair been less rugged, there 
might have been no " College Royal of William 
and Mary." 

XXIX. 

At the end of the seventeenth century there 
were efficient beginnings of higher education only 
in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia. New 
York was too much divided by the various nation- 
alities of its people and too deeply interested in a 
trade reaching from Lake Ontario to the pirate 
settlements of Madagascar to have advanced be- 
yond rudimentary schools. Pennsylvania and the 
Carolinas were too new, Maryland and Rhode 
Island too much subdivided in religion, and the 
eastward settlements of New England were too 
backward in development. Massachusetts had 
firmly established a college destined to an illus- 
trious career, Connecticut was about to start into 
the new century with her Yale College, and Vir- 
ginia was flushed with hope of a time when the 
grammar school at Williamsburg should grow into 
" a certaine place of universall study," as its charter 
proposed. These small beginnings were enough to 
mark the persistence in the Western world of the 



TJie Traditio7i of Ediication. 



255 



English tradition in favor of higher education. 
In communities like the expanding English-Ameri- 
can colonies of that time, necessarily materialistic 
in ideals and schemes of life, the mere existence of 
schools whose principal studies had no value that 
could be balanced against tobacco and codfish, 
pipe staves and beaver skins — studies whose value 
could not be reckoned in pine-tree shillings and 
pieces of eight — was of high import.. 

Elucidations. 

" In the same year of our Lord's incarnation, 664," says Bade, 
" a sudden pestilence . . . ravaged the country far and near. . . , 
This pestilence did no less harm in the island of Ireland. Many 
of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation were 
there at that time, . . . either for the sake of Divine studies 
or of a more continent life ; and some of them presently devoted 
themselves to a monastic life, others chose rather to apply them- 
selves to study, going about from one master's cell to another." 
Egbert, one of the Englishmen among the Culdees in Ireland, 
succeeded in escaping from the plague by vowing that he would 
say the whole psalter daily to the praise of God, and that he 
would every week fast one whole day and night. The account 
of his austerities in Bede, book iii, chap, xxvii, throws light on 
the ideals of life taught in the monasteries of the seventh century. 
In Tanner's Notitia Monastica he says of the Culdees : " The 
ancient British. Irish, and Saxon Monasteries, we find, were 
Schools and Universities of those times ; they were not only Cells 
of Devotion, but also Nurseries of Learned Men for the use of the 
Church." To imagine anything like modern school or university 
instruction or learning in the monasteries of that early age would 
be misleading. In the Catholic monasteries and cathedral estab- 
lishments organization was perhaps more perfect than among the 
Culdees. We get a view of higher and lower instruction as 
already established in a canon of A. D. 747, number 7, in John- 
son's Ecclesiastical Laws. Some curious traits of the schools in 
the houses of the priests may be deduced from the canons in the 



Chap. V. 



Note I, 
page 208. 

Schools 
before the 
Reforma- 
tion. 



256 



The Trajisit of Civilization. 



same work under A. D 960, numbers 10, 11, 51, and A. D. 994, 
numbers 19 and 20. " When the Monks were rooted out by the 
Danish wars," says Tanner, " an universal ignorance overspread 
the land, insomuch that there was scarce any one in England 
that could read or write Latin. But when, by the care of King 
Edgar and Archbishop Dunstan, Monasteries were restored, 
Learning found its former encouragement." Preface to Notitia 
Monastica. Fitzstephen relates that there were famous schools 
in three principal churches of London in the twelfth century. 
Furnivall cites a saying of Roger Bacon that there were schools 
in every city, town, burgh, and castle in the thirteenth century. 
Compare also Wright's Domestic Manners and Sentiments in the 
Middle Ages, 338 and ff. There is evidence of the survival of 
the teaching of children by the mass priest in the action of the 
corporation of Bridgenorth. When a more modern " Comyn 
Scole " was substituted at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
a by-law was adopted which ordained that " there schall no priste 
kepe no scole save oonly oon child to helpe hym to sey masse." 
MSS. Commission, x, part iv, 425. There is an instance as late 
as Mary's reign of the restoration of an ancient endowment by 
town lands for the support of a priest " Habill to teache Gram- 
mar." Ibid., 533. In Collier's Ecclesiastical History, part ii, 
book iii, 165 (Lathbury's edition, vol. v, 29), we read: "The 
abbeys were very serviceable places for the education of young 
people ; every convent had one person or more assigned for this 
business. Thus the children of the neighborhood were taught 
[Latin] grammar and music without any charge to their parents : 
and in the nunneries those of the other sex learned to work and 
read English, with some advances into Latin." Stow, in his Sur- 
vey of London, notes that the Lateran Council in 1176 recog- 
nized cathedral schools, but in the Capitularies of Theodolf they 
are carried back to the end of the eighth century, and were, 
beyond doubt, still older. Johnson's Ecclesiastical Laws, 994, 
19. Down to the end of the tenth century almost the only 
seminaries in Charlemagne's dominions appear to have been in 
cathedrals and convents. First Report of Cathedral Commission, 
XXV. It is to be noted that many of the English cathedrals were 
monastic institutions ; in eight out of seventeen in the twelfth 
century the chapters were composed entirely of monks. Col- 
lier's Ecclesiastical History, book iv, cent, xii, 341 (vol. ii, 232, 
of Lathbury). On the origin of cathedrals and the colleges in 
the early Episcopia, see Report of Cathedral Commission, p. iv. 



The Tradition of Education. 



257 



Schotel. in his Oud Hollandsch Huisgezin der Zeventiende 
Eeuw, p. 75, says of education in Holland : " In the earliest time 
most of the parish churches had their schools. . . . The school 
of the cathedral church [hoofdkerk] took the name of the great 
school. ... In these last were taught not only Greek and Latin, 
but Dutch — that is, reading, writing, and ciphering, and not 
alone to the children of the well-to-do, but to the poor as well. 
They were all comrades in the school as in the street." Roger's 
Work and Wages, 165, 166, remarks on the widely diffused 
knowledge of Latin in the middle ages. Until the fourteenth cen- 
tury English was not even suffered to play tender to Latin in 
the schools, but in 1363 "it was ordeined that schoolemasters 
should teach their scholers to construe their lessons in English 
& not in French, as before they had beene vsed.'' Holinshed, 
ii, 678. Down to the Reformation Latin was taught before the 
reading of English, as we learn from Mulcaster, an Elizabethan 
schoolmaster. "Now," he adds, "we are returned home to 
our English abce." Positions, chap. v. 

A definite number of scholars were to be sustained in each 
cathedral while living in commons. Whiston's Cathedral Trusts 
and Harrison's Description of Britaine, i, 235. The First Cathe- 
dral Report, p. xxiv, cites Cranmers Reformatio Legum that every 
cathedral should maintain a school for the mature education of 
youth. Chantry priests, whose support came from endowments 
for prayers for the dead, found their occupation gone when the 
government had forbidden all praying for the dead, and had in- 
deed abolished purgatory. It was therefore ordained that such 
priests should " exercise themselves in teaching youth to read and 
write and bring them up in good manners and vertuous exercises." 
Bills were brought into Parliament in Edward VI's reign "for 
incouraging men to give lands for the maintenance of schools." 
Tanner's Notitia Monastica, preface, citing MS. authority. 

By suppressing the alien priories, which were but offshoots of 
foreign monasteries, Henry V made a tempting precedent for 
Henry VIII, but Henry VI supplied the place of the schools lost 
with the suppressed priories in the preceding reign by founding 
various free schools in 1393 and 1394. See the section on Schooles 
and Houses of Learning in Stow's Sun'ey of London, and Col- 
lier's treatment of this period in his Ecclesiastical History. Dean 
Colet's foundation of St. Pauls School in 1512 was "in place of 
an old ruined house," says Stow, and Christ's Hospital, in 1553, 



Chap. V. 



Note 2, 
page 209. 



Note 3, 
page 210. 



258 



The Transit of Civilization. 



was planted in the " late dissolved house of the Grey Friars," and 
"a school was ordained there." Many of the new free schools of 
the Reformation period were endowed out of the spoils of the 
monasteries. " For the most part the endowments were out of 
the tithes formerly belonging to the religious houses or out of 
chantry lands given to the king in the first of his reign, ac- 
cording to the intent of parliament therein, which was to convert 
them from superstitious uses into more godly, as in erecting great 
schools for the education of youth in virtue and godliness." 
Strype's Memorials (1822), vii, part ii, pp. 50, 51. Thomas Wil- 
liams, Speaker of the House of Commons, in 1562 " took notice 
of the Want of Schools ; that at least an Hundred were wanting 
in England which before his time had been." In giving this pas- 
sage Strype adds, " being destroyed (I suppose he meant) by the 
Dissolution of Monasteries and Religious Houses." Annals of 
the Reformation, i, 292. The demand for Latin schools was no 
doubt increased by the growing ambition of the people in the new 
social conditions. No means were so convenient " to make Jack 
a gentleman " as to send him to the university to win the coveted 
title of " Mr." Even cobblers sought education for their sons. 
Hall's Satires, iv, H ; Howell's Letters, 405, 406. Mulcaster 
thought that every child should learn to read English and also 
to write for his " necessary dealings." Positions, chap. 36. He 
refuses Latin to the common people because of the prevailing 
ambition to rise in England, but he adds significantly that " both 
clownes in the countrie and artificers in townes be allowed lattine 
in well gouerned states, who yet rest in their callings." " Fac- 
tors or Marchants and the like, going beyond seas find it neces- 
sary and convenient to speak Latin," says Brinsley, Ludus Lite- 
rarius, 211. 

There was published in 1538 an A B C book, and it has 
been reprinted. The editor writes a preface wherein he says the 
Ten Commandments are not included. But they are included in 
rhyme — rhyme was the only amelioration of reading in that day. 
This is the authorized primer of 1538, though the editor says 
it is not. It has the ABC and the *' a b abs," the Lord's 
Prayer in Latin and English, the Hail Mary in both tongues, and 
the Creed in both. Then there are parts of songs in Latin, " to 
help a priest to sing " — that is, for the child to help him to sing. 
This is followed, wholly in English, by an extended grace before 
and grace after " dyner." Then there is a grace for " fysshe 
dayes " and grace after dinner, and a short grace to be said be- 



The Tradition of Education. 



259 



fore dinner and another to be said before " dyner " or *' souper," 
a short grace after dinner and another after dinner or supper, then 
two graces after supper, then an Easter grace before and after 
dinner, then a prayer, then the Ten Commandments in rhyme, 
and then a series of rhyming precepts. The great number of 
graces before and after meat came from the habit of having chil- 
dren say grace. There were no breakfasts in Henry VIII's time, 
and no graces for such a meal. 

One may be permitted to doubt the unbroken continuity of 
the master's Latin in many cases. The language in which the 
celebrated Harvey lectured to medical students on the circulation 
of the blood was probably better Latin than an ordinary school- 
master's, but it is intentionally mottled throughout with English. 
Take this phrase for one example of a thousand : " Exempto 
corde frogg scipp eele crawle dogg ambulat." Prelectiones, 7. 
But Bacon says that pupils are to make paper books and to note 
the best sentences of the Roman tongue, and practice them in 
speaking and writing. 

I have referred in the margin to Wigglesworth's complaint of 
the " boldness to transgress the college law in speaking English." 
Brinsley laments the remissness of his time in teaching English. 
Some colleges in the English universities made the constant use 
of Latin obligatory (Brinsley *s Ludus, 211), but in all lectures 
and exercises were in Latin. Harvard students were quite un- 
able to speak Latin when Bankers met them in 1689. It may 
safely be said that the colloquial use of Latin never found a lodg- 
ment in America. 

Brinsley had " laboured and striven by Ferula and all meanes 
of severity " to improve the Latin of his boys, but he says, " I 
have not been able to make Schollers to vtter their mindes in any 
toUerable manner of ordinary things," etc., " without great sever- 
ity." He confesses " they will not be brought to give overspeak- 
ing English." Ludus Literarius, 215. Theoretically, students 
admitted to Harvard could all speak Latin, but the requirements 
for admission were probably not strictly exacted. "When any 
scholar is able to read TuUy or such like classical Latin author 
extempore, and to make and speak true Latin in verse and prose 
Suo {ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigms of 
nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, then may he be admitted 
into the college." Laws, etc., of Harvard, 1642- 1646. Quincy's 
Harvard College, i, 515. 



Chap. V. 

Note 5, 
page 215. 



Note 6, 
page 215. 



Note 7, 
page 215. 



Note 8, 
page 215. 



26o 



The Transit of Civilization. 



The rage for disputation in the schools had been even greater 
in earlier times before logic had been mainly relegated to the 
universities. Fitzstephen says in the twelfth century that upon 
holy days assemblies gather in the churches to hear these dispu- 
taitons of scholars, in which all the technical forms of reasoning 
and rhetoric taught by the schoolmen are practiced for display, 
and boys of the different schools "wrangle together in the art 
of versifying, and canvase the principles of Grammar." Stow's 
Survey, 705, with his quaint translation, 710, 799, edition 1633. 
In the sixteenth century this had been done away with, but Stow 
himself had seen assemblies of boys from various schools gathered 
in a churchyard to dispute on an improvised platform about the 
principles of grammar for the fun of the thing. As above, 64. 
When these gatherings ceased the boys from the rival schools of 
St. Pauls and St. Anthonys would provoke one another in the 
open street with the challenge to debate " Salve tu quoque, placet 
tibi mecum disputare.?" To which the reply "Placet" being 
given, they fell to wrangling over tenses and constructions until 
often there ensued a general scrimmage of the two parties laden 
with satchels of books and piling themselves on one another in 
heaps to the obstruction of the streets. 

The usher who was ultimately to be master of the free school 
at Charles City, Va., was apparently incompetent to teach writ- 
ing and arithmetic. The Company gave him permission to take 
with him "an expert writer," who should be able to teach "the 
grounds of arithmetic, whereby to instruct the children in mat- 
ters of account." But no other provision was made for such a 
man than to give him his passage free, leaving him to be paid by 
the parents. Abstract of Records, ii, 167. The form proposed 
for the organization of the school at Charles City, Va., was identi- 
cal with that carried out in the grammar school of William and 
Mary College, nearly a hundred years later. There was in both 
a master, an usher, and a writing master. Compare Ingle's Let- 
ter, 1705, in Historical Collections relating to the Colonial Church, 
Virginia, 140. See the statute regulating the mendicancy of 
scholars of the university in 1388. Statutes at Large, ii, 302. 
Students appear to have continued to beg until forbidden by the 
statute of 1572 in the reign of Elizabeth. Compare also Jusse- 
raud's English Wayfaring Life, 232, 233, and Wright's Domestic 
Manners, 339. The "poor scholars" were still made prominent 
in early appeals for Harvard College, and one is tempted to sus- 
pect, from the prominence given to Indian education at Harvard 



TJie Tradition of Education. 



261 



and in the early Virginia projects, that the " infidel " was substi- 
tuted in part for the poor scholar as a means of stimulating liber- 
ahty. A kind of mixed school, in which plebeian arithmetic jostled 
Latin grammar, existed in England and appeared early in Amer- 
ica. For example, Dedham Records for 1663, 1670, iv, 67, 133. 
Bailey's Andover, 517. Compare p. 520 of Bailey, where there 
is a sort of confession that English studies are intruders in a 
Latin school, for a schoolmaster in 1723 is specifically bound as 
an additional duty " that he wold Teach boys to Read, Rite, and 
Cypher." Comp. MSS. Commission X, part iv, 138-140, where 
in 1695 a so-called writing school endowed by Sir John Moore is 
expected to fit boys for the university. 

The old conception of education is struggling with the new. 
Of old higher education was the property of the few. In 1559 
one of the measures suggested to Parliament was that the study 
of the laws, temporal or civil, be restricted to the sons of noble- 
men or gentlemen. Seven years later Knox sought to teach 
everybody their " first rudimentie " in order to render them Prot- 
estant. In 1616 the Synod of Dort tried to teach the catechism 
to all for purposes of religious indoctrination. In 1622 we find 
Brinsley struggling blindly with the principles of education, " God 
having ordained schooles of learning to be a principall meanes to 
reduce a barbarous people to ciuilities." It was just twenty-five 
years later that Massachusetts proposed to confound " the ould 
deluder Satan" by schools especially in Latin and Greek and 
Hebrew, but English schools were finally almost the only out- 
come of the act, the practical sense of the people gradually 
doing away with the superannuated Latin school. Of course, 
the clergy were educated in Latin. Justus Forward, of Belcher- 
town, Mass., so late as 1763, writes D. D. (dies dominica) for 
Sunday, and several other days appear in their Latin dress. He 
says " studiebam " and " occupatus studiendo," "occupatus de 
iisdem," and " Daniel dragged ibidem," in his English diary. 
MS. in my possession. 

The first Virginia Assembly, in 161 9, petitioned in favor of 
the erection of a proposed " university and college." New York 
Historical Collections, iii, i, 342. The Company, with wise fore- 
thought, reser\'ed liberal tracts of land for the support of churches 
and a local school in each plantation. Smith of Nibley MSS., 
New York Public Library, In Fuller's Worthies, i, 566, 567, it 
is said that Edward Palmer (whom Camden, in his Britannia, 1610, 



Chap. V. 



Note 10, 
page 2ig. 



Note II, 
page 221. 



262 



The Transit of Civilisatioji. 



folio 366, calls "a curious and diligent antiquarie," and who died 
in 1625) purchased an island in Virginia, called " Palmer's Island 
unto this day," and that he spent several thousand pounds m a 
fruitless endeavor to plant an academy upon it. Neill, in his Vir- 
ginia Vetusta, says that the island in question was at the mouth 
of the Susquehanna, and gives for authority the Hermans-Fai- 
thorne map. I had the unique copy of this map in the British 
Museum examined, and received this report : " There is no island 
marked Palmer's Island on the map indicated at the embouchure 
of the Susquehanna or at any other point. There are marks of 
islands, but no name attached." That the island at the mouth 
of the Susquehanna was called Palmer's Island is to be deduced 
from the Proceedings of the Council in Maryland Archives, where 
an observation of its longitude is recorded in 1683. It was a wild 
and solitary place for a school. 

In 1467 a testator left a cow to keep wax candles burning be- 
fore the image of the Virgin in Felsham Church. In 1530 two 
cows were bequeathed " to the sepulchre light in Ampton Church 
to continew for evyr." In such cases the increase of the kine 
went to make the bequest perpetual. Bury wills, Camden So- 
ciety, pp. 44 and 249. Dr. Fuller, the physician of the Pilgrims, 
gave " the first cow calf that my brown cow shall have to the 
church of God at Plymouth," and a ewe lamb was a common 
bequest to that church. Brigham, in Lowell Institute Lectures, 
174, 175- 

In the manuscript records of Christ Church parish, Middlesex 
County, Va., I find allusion to a free school already existing, for 
the benefit of which two cows have been bequeathed in 1691. 
As early as 1655 four cows were left in Isle of Wight County for 
maintaining and schooling orphans. In 1669 King Free School, 
in the same county, was established by bequest, and some other 
endowments can be traced, while there were those probably of 
which no record has been found. See two papers on this subject 
in the William and Mary Quarterly for 1897. 

The boast of Sir William Berkeley, in 1671, that there were no 
free schools in Virginia — Hening, ii, 511 and ff., and Virginia His- 
torical Register, iii, 12 — has been repeated by superficial writers 
on the period. Berkeley adds, " Learning has brought disobe- 
dience and heresy and sects into the world." The passage is but 
a vivacious revelation of the state of mind of a willful and avari- 
cious dotard, in whom contempt for the popular rights and the 



The Tradition of Education, 



26' 



wishes of the people was hardening into that brutality which 
made his last years so terrible for Virginia, and brought about 
his own ignominious downfall. In 1671, when Berkeley wrote, 
the Symmes free school was in existence, the Eaton school was 
founded before 1646 probably, the King Free School endowment 
was made two years before, and four years later Peasley's liberal 
bequest was given for another free school. Both the Symmes 
and Eaton schools were in existence more than a century after 
their planting. An act had been passed in 1661 for the founding 
of a college which involved a free school. Berkeley probably 
knew better than any other person why the project slumbered. 
See section xxv of the present chapter. But the English system 
of free schools did not and could not obtain to any considerable 
extent in Virginia in 1671 or even later; physical and social con- 
ditions were against it. Compare Foote's Virginia, i, 11. In 
colony times the only Virginia school that rose to the dignity of 
the English free schools was the one attached to William and 
Mary College. Compare the inhibitions of printing in Virginia in 
1682, Virginia Historical Register, iii, 13, and the utter prohibi- 
tion of printing presses in Effingham's instructions of 1685. The 
allusions to schools in the seventeenth century that can be picked 
up from the remaining local records of Virginia are not many, but 
by comparing them with Beverley's statement of Effingham's 
course in licensing teachers about 1684, and then examining the 
replies of the Virginia clergy in 1724 to the Queries of the Bishop 
of London, we can form some notion of the voluntary education 
by means of " old field schools " that early grew up among the 
Virginians. As the bishop's query asks only about parish schools, 
some of the replies give negative information ; but wherever the 
clergyman mentions the rustic schools they seem to be fairly nu- 
merous for a new country, to be taught by men and not women, 
and not to be above the level of the rough country school of the 
period elsewhere. "In most parishes," says Hugh Jones, "are 
schools in Little Houses built on purpose, where are taught Eng- 
hsh and writing." One private school for Latin and Greek flour- 
ishes in the same parish with two endowed schools of a lower 
grade. In one case a plantation was given to the incumbent of the 
parish on condition that he should sustain " a sufficient person " 
to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. In Maryland, the ideal 
of Bray was a free school in every county, and one or two in the 
province for Indians. This does not account for the little schools/ 
General View of the Colonies, prefi.xed to sermon of 1697, p. 7. 
18 

/ 



qHAP. V. 

\ 



264 



The Transit of Civilization. 



In Ciuile and Vnciuile Life, 1579, 1586, Roxburghe edition, p. 
21, the country gentleman is made to say, " Wee gentlemen 
in the Country, vnlesse our sonnes proceed in the study of the 
common lawes, Diunitie, or Phisicke, doo hold them learned 
ynough if they can write and read English, and congrue Latine." 
Note that he must " congrue Latine " — that is, after a fashion 
put it together. This probably represents the education thought 
fit for his son by the Virginia planter a hundred years later. 
Even so much Latin probably could not always be had. 

There were some convicts who were capable of teaching, but 
the convicts were not usually of the kind to supply teachers, and 
in Virginia in the seventeenth century there were fewer of these 
than of indentured servants known as " free-willers " who had 
embarked of their own accord, and the " kids " who had been 
" trapanned " aboard ship by craft or force. The schoolmasters 
no doubt usually belonged to the class of voluntary or involuntary 
redemptioners, and not among the petty criminals who were sold 
for seven years. The will of Colonel John Carter, in 1669, spe- 
cifically provides for the purchase of a bond servant who had 
been " brought up in the Latin school," to teach his son Robert, 
afterward the famous King Carter of Virginia. See quotations 
from the records at Lancaster Court House in a letter from Mr. 
Wilson Miles Cary in The Nation of April 22, 1897. Boucher 
long afterward says that two thirds of the schools in Maryland 
were taught either by indentured servants or by convicts. Causes, 
184, 189. I think the convicts much the smaller of the two classes. 
Boucher would have mentioned the fact had it been the other way. 

The general responsibility of a corporate town as such for the 
support of its school, where there was one, was a trait of English 
life, carried over to the rustic municipalities or " towns " of New 
England, and gradually changed to our more local system. Com- 
pare, for example, what Brinsley says in 1622 in speaking of 
badly managed schools : " That it were better to turne the main- 
tenance given to the schoole to bear the charges of the towne for 
other duties and seruices tlien so vnprofitably to employ it." 
Consolations for Our Grammar Schooles, 43. 

The rough life of the frontier has always been dangerous to 
morals and manners. The remedy proposed in Massachusetts 
was rather traditional than practical. It was ordained in 1642 
that children when tending cattle v^'ere to employ their time at 
spinning on the rock or distaff and knitting tape , and boys and 



The Tradition of Education. 



265 



girls were forbidden to converse together. Such an order was 
doubtless without any result. In 1645, after the news of the 
great Virginia massacre had startled New England, boys were 
ordered to learn the use of small guns, half pikes, and bows 
and arrows, thus reviving old English customs and customs as 
old as the Roman law, no longer of any value. Compare Rid- 
ley's View of the Law, 1634, p. 48. 

In President Chauncy's Commencement Sermon of 1655, P- 
38, what may be called the unattainable ideal of the time is 
thus expressed : " In cittyes and greater towns schools should 
teach the Latin and Greek tongues, and Hebrew also, which 
ought to be had in great account with us for the Old Testa- 
ment sake." 

In the platform of Church Discipline adopted in 1648, vi, 6, 
the school is regarded as " lawful, profitable, & necessary for 
training of such in good Literature or Learning as may afterward 
be called forth unto office of Pastor or Teacher in the Church." 
This hesitating indorsement of the school is backed up by half 
a dozen texts of Scripture. In re-enacting the school law the Con- 
necticut General Court of 1673 omitted the epithet " old deluder " 
before Satan, whose character was well enough known by this 
time, and in 1692 the diabolical preamble disappeared entirely from 
the laws of Massachusetts. Compare also the New Hampshire 
law of 17 1 5. In 1673 Connecticut made it obligatory on county 
towns to have a grammar school, "for the use of the county," 
under penalty (after 1677) of ten pounds. In 1678 Connecticut 
took the lead of Massachusetts by making it obligatory on every 
town of thirty families to have an English school. In 1684 the 
surplus money of the treasury was to go to the grammar schools. 
All this legislation testifies to the increasing difficulty of main- 
taining the so-called Latin school. Massachusetts in 1671 in- 
creased the fine for neglecting schools to ten pounds, and ordered 
it paid to the nearest town having a grammar school. To cite 
no other evidence of the struggle to keep alive grammar schools, 
the New Hampshire law of 1721, in something like desperation, 
makes the failure for a single month on the part of a town of one 
hundred families to provide a Latin school punishable by a fine 
of twenty pounds, to be collected from the personal estate of the 
selectmen. This was no doubt in depreciated currency. See 
Weeden's Economic History of New England on the decline, and 
in some cases the extinction, of New England Schools. 



Chap. V. 



Note 19, 
page 230. 



Note 20, 
page 231. 



266 



The Transit of Civilization. 



From the Third Report for the Commissioners on Education 
in Scotland for i867-'68 we learn that schools for Latin, to which 
were subsequently added " Lecture " schools for English, existed in 
the chief towns from a very early period. Several of these schools 
are known to date from the twelfth century. All the chief towns 
had schools before the beginning of the sixteenth century. " The 
statute of James IV (1496), which ordains that barons and free- 
holders who were of substance should put their eldest sons and 
heirs to the ' scholes fra they be six or nine year of age, and to 
remain at the Grammar Schools quill they be competentlie found- 
ed and have perfite Latine,' is conclusive on this point." These 
schools were closely connected with the cathedrals, monasteries, 
and religious establishments ; the teachers were ecclesiastics " or 
in some way connected with the cathedrals and monasteries," and 
they were sometimes sustained by altarages. " The scholars . . . 
were no doubt originally those destined for the church. Grad- 
ually, however, sons of gentry and of barons . . , were sent . , . 
to these schools, and from the beginning of the second or more 
flourishing period of the history all the higher middle classes 
took advantage of them." It is interesting to find that not only 
the grammar but the elementary schools existed in Scotland in 
1494. In that year the chancellor of the diocese of Glasgow 
orders that no one without his license should teach " scholares in 
grammatica aut juvenes in puerilibus.'' Light is thrown on the 
condition of Scottish schools just before the Reformation by An- 
drew Melville's account in McCrie's Life of Knox, 475, 476. The 
repeated legislation in 1616, 1633, 1646, and finally in 1696, shows 
how slowly the plan was put in force. Report of Commissioners, p. 
8. It is worth remarking as illustrating the force of historic con- 
tinuity, even in time of revolution, that Knox's reader or minister 
teaching the rudiments in an " upaland " town is only a Protestant 
reproduction of the older priest in small parishes combining 
teaching with " praying for the people," such as we have already 
mentioned above as existing in former ages in England. It would 
carry us too far afield to note here the rather futile efforts made 
in the seventeenth century to make Knox's ideal actual in Scot- 
land, or to discuss the Scotch school establishment of 1696, etc. 
It is sufficient that the plan set forth in 1560 remained a fixed 
ideal and tradition in Scotland, as the plan of 1647 did in New 
England. In 1704 most of the parishes in Scotland had each a 
Latin school in name, but the masters were nearly all incompe- 
tent. The schools were not free, but, as in many New England 



The Tradition of Education. 



267 



towns, the fees of the scholars eked out the teacher's living. Pro- 
posals, etc., in Harleian Miscellany, Park's edition, i, 500 and ff. 
Some towns, as Polworth in 1652, had no salary for the teacher 
except his " quarter payments " from the pupils. MSS. Commis- 
sion, xiv, App, iii, p. 94. Comp. p. 128. As in Scotland, so in 
Holland, the reformed clergy early sought to strengthen their 
position by means of schools and a system of catechetical instruc- 
tion. The plan proposed by the Synod of Dort in 161 8, probably 
with a purpose of extirpating Arminianism as well as Romanism, 
was to establish schools for teaching "Christian doctrine" "in 
towns and country places where none have existed." In these 
schools the children of the poor were to be gratuitously instruct- 
ed by orthodox teachers, well versed in the catechism. Two* 
whole days in the week were to be given up to teaching the cate- 
chism. The resolutions are translated in De Witt's Historical 
Sketch of the Parochial School System of Holland preceding Dun- 
shee's History of the Dutch Church School in New York. Of 
the state of the schools of Holland in the seventeenth century a 
notion may be formed from Schotel's Oud Hollandsch Huisge- 
zin, Hoofdstuk, x, from which I have quoted in a preceding note. 
Compare also a brief summary in English of Schotel's chapter in 
Geddes's History of the Administration of John De Witt, 33-37. 
Some of the mistresses of Dutch bye schools or shop schools (by- 
scholen, winkelscholen) could not read, but taught the catechism 
orally, and the school teaching was generally of a primitive sort. 
But the Synod of Dort had made a declaration resembling that of 
Knox in favor of schools in every parish, and this unattained 
Dutch ideal would be likely to have weight also in New Eng- 
land. Rude and imperfect as was the system launched by the 
Massachusetts law of 1647, it made "writeing and reading," not 
the catechism, as in Holland, the corner stone of the country 
school. 

A letter written by Governor Dudley to the Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel in 1701 says of Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut, New Hampshire, and Maine, " I am of opinion that 
there are no children to be found ten years old who do not read 
well, nor men of twenty that do not write tolerably." Such a con- 
dition probably has never existed among the people of so large a 
region in any part of America from the Glacial epoch to the pres- 
ent time, and, considering the character of the astute politician 
who expressed this opinion, one should not take it too seriously. 
It is said by Upham, the industrious historian of Salem, that very 



Chap. V. 



Note 22, 
page 235. 



268 



The Transit of Civilization. 



many people could not read in the ancient capital only nine years 
earlier, and that schools were in a bad condition. 

In the Blue Book for 1867 the Report on Burgh and Middle 
Class Schools in Scotland, from which I have already quoted, 
referring to the Buke of Discipline, says that by the colleges which 
Knox proposed for every notable town he intended "grammar 
schools on the model of those more ancient seminaries in which 
the 'trivium' or course of three sciences were taught," p. 5. A 
passage in the same report on p. 7 suggests the source of John 
Harvard's inspiration : " Cambuslang, where the Rev. John Har- 
rison, minister of the parish, endowed a Grammar School in 1602 ; 
with Prestonpans, where a trilingual school for the teaching of 
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew was founded about the same time by 
the Rev. John Davidson, who endowed it with all his fortune, 
including his books." That it was early found difficult to exact 
Hebrew of the Harvard students is apparent from the extracts 
from Wigglesworth's diary in 1653, given in Sibley's Harvard 
Graduates, vol. i, under the name of the diarist. 

A multitude of illustrations might be cited. " That ye educa- 
tion of youth may be carried on sutably to Christs ends, by ye 
counsail of the teaching elders in this colony," is the phrase of 
the New Haven Colony Records in 1660, vol. ii, 373. A very 
notable entry in the town records of New Haven in 1723 directs 
that a certain piece of land be used " for the educating of chil- 
dren of Congregational or Presbyterian parents only, and for no 
other use whatever, forever, hereafter." Atwater's New Haven, 
151. 

Meals were hard to reckon with in the reigns of Elizabeth and 
James. It seems clear that most people of position in Elizabeth's 
reign ate their first meal at about noon. Harrison, in Holinshed, 
i, 287, says : " Heretofore there hath b^ene much more time 
spent in eating and drinking than commonlie is in these dales, for 
whereas of old we had breakfasts in the forenoone, beverages or 
nuntions after dinner, and thereto reare suppers generallie when 
it was time to go to rest, . . . Now these od repasts thanked be 
God are verie well left, and ech one in a maner, (except here and 
there some yoong hungrie stomach that cannot fast till dinner 
time) contentes himself with dinner and supper onelie." 

In 1555 the burgh school in Aberdeen began at seven o'clock, 
according to the report on Burgh and Middle Class Schools in 
Scotland, There was an intermission of an hour at nine, " when all 



The Traditiojt of Educatioti. 



269 



were directed to hasten to breakfast." The school was then re- 
sumed from ten to twelve, and again from two to six. But most 
English schools were held unbrokenly from six to eleven and from 
one to six, and even at a later period, as we may infer from Brins- 
ley. In another Scottish school, that at Elgin in 1649, work be- 
gan at six and continued till six, with two hours' intermission — 
one for breakfast and one for dinner. Report as above, p. 15. 
I can find no trace in later schools of the bever taken in the 
schoolroom, which must have been the custom in the reign of 
Henry VIII. The statutes of St. Paul's School, as drawn by 
Colet, say : " Also I will they bring no meate nor drinke, nor bot- 
tel, nor use in the school no breakfasts, nor drinkings in the tyme 
of learnynge in no wise," etc. Knight's Life of Colet, 308. The 
hours of St. Paul's School were from seven to eleven and from 
one to five. This, with the difference between Aberdeen in 1553 
and Elgin in 1649, as given above, and some other facts I have 
noted, cause me to suspect that the longest hours came in only 
with the new zeal of the Reformation period. But Colet's statutes 
are very severe in refusal of holidays, etc. " Yf the master grant- 
ith any remedyes he shall forfeit xl s. totiens quotiens," etc. The 
holy days of the Church were interruption enough in Colet's 
time. As late as 1763 I find in Justin Forward's diary that he 
visited Hatfield's school, and advised a "vacancy," which was 
granted. Manuscript in my possession. 

John Brinsley was a clergyman of Puritan tendencies, and a 
brother-in-law to the famous Bishop Hall. He has been less 
cited than his forerunners Ascham or Mulcaster, but he appears 
to have had practical ideas on the subject of school management 
in advance of both, and his books are most instructive to the 
student of the history of education, especially his Ludus Litera- 
rius and his Consolations for Our Grammar Schooles. The latter 
has a special interest for us, because it was written to promote 
the welfare of the schools projected for Virginia, as well as those 
in Ireland and Wales. It was submitted to the Virginia Company 
for approval before its publication. Among the reforms advocated 
by Brinsley were a somewhat later hour of beginning schools, a 
recess for breakfast in the middle of the forenoon, and another in 
the middle of the afternoon, and a large attention to the teaching 
of English. 

The passage in Brinsley's Consolations, p. 43, is suggestive : 
" When our scholars coming to man's estate shall cvrse vs for 



Chap. V. 



Note 27, 
page 242. 



Note 28, 
page 244. 



2/0 



The Transit of Civilization. 



that by our blowes they were made dunses or deafe ... or to 
hate all learning." " They think themselves the best school- 
masters when they teach little and beat much," says Becon. He 
says one might think them " vexed with some infernal fury." It 
should be remembered, in mitigation of censure on the school- 
masters, that in a civilization like that of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, discipline without corporal punishment would 
have been more difficult than in our later time. The pupils re- 
garded their master as a natural enemy. This was hit off by a 
Dutch schoolmaster of that time, whose sign before his door 
showed a portrait of himself sitting in the midst of his uproarious 
and unruly scholars with a crown on his head and this legend be 
low : " Het gekroonde hoofd-sweer " (The crowned headache). 
Schotel's Oud Hollandsch Huisgezin, 76. From this antagonism 
came the practice of "barring out," or, as it was called in this 
country, " turning the master out." There was an early instance 
of this turning out at William and Mary, in which the boys re- 
ceived encouragement from Governor Nicholson himself, and fired 
blank cartridges at Dr. Blair, the president. This custom seems to 
have died in England only in the nineteenth century. It lingered 
long enough in this country for the present writer to have par- 
taken of a " treat " of apples served by one master to buy exemp- 
tion from it, and to have had the bitter experience when about 
twelve years old of leading in an actual conflict of the kind, when 
the resolute master with stalwart help from without broke down 
the door casing and carried the house by storm. Addison at the 
same age was more successful at Litchfield in an enterprise of 
the kind, according to Dr. Johnson. The practice was very com- 
mon in the seventeenth century. See the Gentleman's Magazine 
of 1828, part ii, pp. 402-408. The custom of " taking the school " 
was set down as an old one in Aberdeen in 1 568, when the boys 
secured three days of vacation. In 1604 the boys again "took 
the school " with guns and other weapons, and foraged for " puir 
folke's geir," such as " geisse, foullis, and ultheris vivaris." 
Burgh Records of Aberdeen, xxviii. 

Mulcaster, like his predecessor Ascham, was an admirer of 
the classical attainments of Queen Elizabeth, and so inclined to 
advise a higher education for women than was customary. But 
tradition was against him. " I set not yong maidens to publike 
grammar Schooles," he says, " a thing not used in my countrie, 
I send them not to the vniversities, having no president thereof in 
my countrie." He says that maidens " taught to read and write. 



The Tradition of Edtication. 



271 



to sing and play, to speak daily spoken tongues, and of best 
reputations in our times " compared well with men. Positions, 
166. The Puritans naturally regarded Elizabeth's rule with dis- 
favor, and her masculine acquirements seemed to them rather 
unscriptural. Anne Bradstreet was an example, however, of an 
educated woman in New England, though a reluctant Puritan, 
and An Cotton of a cultivated woman in Virginia. " For the 
first fifty years after the settlement very little is on record in re- 
spect to schools, and from the numerous instances of persons of 
the second generation who could not write their names, it is evi- 
dent that education was at a low ebb. Female instruction in 
particular must have been greatly neglected, when the daughters 
of men who occupied important offices in the town and church 
were obliged to make a mark for their signature. Yet the busi- 
ness of teaching was then chiefly performed by women. . . . 
Every quarter of the town had its mistress, who taught children 
to behave, to ply the needle through all the mysteries of hem- 
ming, overhand stitching, and darning up to the sampler, and to 
read from ABC through the spelling book to the psalter. Chil- 
dren were taught to be mannered and pay respect to their elders, 
especially to dignitaries. In the street they stood aside when 
they met any respectable person or stranger, and saluted him 
with a bow or courtesy, stopping modestly until he had passed. 
This was called ' making their manners.' " Miss Caulkin's History 
of New London, 395. " Children who did not attend school 
were taught to read at home, and nearly all could read, females 
as well as males. Writing was considered much less impor- 
tant, and it was not judged necessary that females in common 
life should learn to write." Judd's History of Hadley, 64. 
Compare Bailey's Andover, 13, footnote. Judd adds that girls 
were not permitted to attend public schools in Boston until 1790, 
and that the permission was not granted in Northampton until 
1802. Mrs. Grant says that in Albany women could usually read 
in Dutch the Bible and a few Calvinistic tracts, but not English 
in 1704. Memoirs of an American Lady, i, 33. Needlework 
was added to this. She adds with unnecessary detail, " This 
confined education prevented elegance." In Philadelphia in 1722 
" flourishing on muslin and embroidering petticoats " was taught 
to young ladies along with French. 

D'Ewes complains of the morals of the university : " Swear- 
ing, drinking, rioting, and hatred of all piety . . . did abound 
. . . generally in the university ... so as I was fain to live al- 



Chap. V. 



Note 30, 
page 247. 



2/2 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. V. 



Note 31, 
page 250. 



most a recluses life." It is characteristic of the age that D'Ewes 
finds consolation in reflecting that the religious opinions of his 
licentious, riotous, and impious fellow-scholars were uncorrupted 
by " Anabaptisticall or Pelagian heresies," and that there was no 
bowing toward the altar. Autobiography, i, 141. Libertines and 
blackguards in abundance, but no Baptists, Arminians, or High- 
churchmen, thank God ! 

The charter of William and Mary College in English is re- 
corded in a beautiful contemporary handwriting in the manuscript 
book of Virginia Instructions, in the Library of Congress. It is 
printed with Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton's account of Virginia, 
and the copy of the latter in the Library of Congress is annotated 
by some critic, who notes slight variations in the sense of the 
English version of the charter from the Latin original. The 
phrase " studium generale " has a sense hardly appreciated by 
those who copied it from the ancient charter for William and 
Mary. See Heinrich Denifle, Die Universitaten des Mittelalters 
bis 1400, 1-29, for an exhaustive study of this word. On page 15 
he says : " Der Dominicaner Ricoldus, de Montecrucis schreibtan 
der Wende des 13 und 14 Jhs. in seinem Werke gegen den Al- 
choran, er sei zu den Sarazenen nach Bagdad gereist, ' ubi gene- 
rale ipsorum sollempne habeter studium.' W^ie im Occident der 
Ausdruck studium generale im Sinne von Lehren Austalt fiir die 
studierenden der Christenheit genommen wurde. So wendete der 
Dominicaner derselben fiir das Hauptstudium der Sarazenen an." 
Blair's instructions from the General Assembly read : " You 
shall make it your business to peruse the best Charters in Eng- 
land . . . having Regard alwaies to the Constitutions of this 
Government." P. R. O. Am. and W. Ind. Bundle 637. 






CHAPTER THE SIXTH. 
LAND AND LABOR LN TILE EARLY COLONIES. 



Englishmen were accustomed to a land system 
the most intricate the world has ever seen. The 
feudal law in its passing had left behind a mass of 
technicalities, and the evasions of that law had 
given birth to a multitude of fictions. In many 
cases instruments of conveyance were ostensibly 
instruments to do something else, and they were 
often not registered, but kept secret. There was 
a jargon of land-law terms mastered by convey- 
ancers, that made it sometimes difficult to transfer 
land. In the century preceding colonization there 
came in the custom of piling up whole vocabularies 
of conveyance in one deed, with endless tediousness 
of repetition of clauses and provisos. The statutes 
were stuffed at the same time until the reader " was 
made giddy by a continual recurrence of the same 
form of words in the same endless period." Law 
came into disrepute as something hardly compre- 
hensible, and a source of endless entanglements to 
the lay mind. Lawyers were forbidden in the 
colonial courts. In Virginia mercenary lawvers — 
that is, lawyers who took fees — were almost wholly 
forbidden until 1658, when they were totally ejected. 

273 



Chap. VI. 

Direct 
ownership 
of the soil. 



Reeves's 
Hist, of 
Law, iv, 
506-508. 



Reeves, iv, 
560. 



Note I. 



Note 2. 



274 



The Transit of Civilization. 



The New England colonies had a like prejudice, and 
would not suffer a single lawyer to becloud the acts 
of the early courts. When Massachusetts came to 
framing a working Constitution in 1641 there was 
a rivalry between Ward and Winthrop, educated 
as lawyers, and Cotton, who wished to proceed on 
a theological basis. The lawyers triumphed, but 
they did so by holding to the severe simplicity of 
old English law. The laws were not even called 
laws, but liberties ; a man had the liberty of being 
hanged in certain cases. Somebody saw the ab- 
surdity, and appended a note explaining that lib- 
erty meant law, and the experiment of using this 
term for laws was not again tried in Massachusetts. 
The Dutch had but one lawyer among them, and 
they pretended to be unwilling to give either side 
in a case the exclusive benefit of his skill. They 
refused him permission to practice. Thus it came 
to pass that the earliest laws were simple and direct. 
Decisions were based on common sense and the 
merits of the case, as seen by the magistrate. 
There were other forces that held land laws to 
simplicity. There was little land in America that 
had come through feudal tenure. Even the king 
as a source of title did not usually appear in the 
deed. In the later seventeenth century lawyers 
and conveyancers began to be sought after; their 
services could no longer be dispensed with. The 
colonial laws and deeds after the Restoration be- 
came somewhat more intricate, and affected the 
English in their style. But the habit of passing 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



275 



land easily had become fixed, and though deeds 
might take on English forms and abound in repeti- 
tions, landholding remained substantially the same, 
the simple and direct ownership of the soil. 



II. 

There was one trait of land law that had sur- 
vived from the middle ages — that had survived 
apparently from nobody knows what remote an- 
tiquity. It made so dry a matter as the transfer of 
land picturesque and dramatic. This was called 
livery of seizin — the delivery of possession. The 
seller stood on the tract to be conveyed and taking 
a bit of turf from the land, and, if there were trees, 
plucking a twig and thrusting it into the turf, 
passed it into the hands of the buyer. The custom 
was capable of many variations. Judge Sewall, of 
Boston, received seizin of six hundred acres of 
forest by " turf, twig, and splinter," as if to em- 
brace all the possibilities of timber land. In the 
history of Salem it is recorded that John Rush 
took a twig from a growing tree and a bit of 
green turf and said, " Here, son Thomas, I do be- 
fore these two men give you possession of this land 
by turffe and twigg." In turning over the primi- 
tive records in Virginia one finds that " livery and 
sesen was made of a turffe of the earth of the 
within written land." In other cases " twigg and 
turff " marks another form. Sometimes the livery 
is marked by a different form and personal estate is 



2/6 



TJie Tratisit of Civilization. 



included. One Colonel Henry Browne, wishing 
to give his whole estate for the benefit of his wife 
and creditors, delivers to them " one silver spoone, 
part of premises as a voucher to lead to intent, pur- 
port," etc. When a house was to be delivered the 
seller took hold of the ring of the house door and 
formally gave it into the hands of the new owner. 
The ground with its appurtenances was thus handed 
over in a manner suitable to illiterate times and re- 
stricted territories. But land in a new country be- 
came an article of frequent merchandise. Tracts 
of wilderness, remote and sometimes unsurveyed, 
could not be given by livery of seizin. In Mary- 
land the mere certificate — the warrant entitling the 
holder to take up land — came presently to be passed 
about as current money. And, indeed, the custom 
of livery of seizin probably went out of use in 
America more rapidly than in England. In Vir- 
ginia, the most conservative of the colonies, it was 
still somewhat in vogue in 1748, when it is recog- 
nized in a statute. Perhaps this was a mark of 
oncoming decrepitude. For a thousand years and 
more it had existed without legislation ; when it 
became necessary to mention it in statute law the 
usage had passed its prime. In England to-day 
the seller often passes a ferule into the hands of the 
buyer of land without leaving the court room. So 
does the faint shadow of ancient custom stretch 
itself across modern life, growing more attenuated 
until at length it vanishes, no one perceiving where 
it left its last trace. 



Laud and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



277 



III. 

One mode of holding land, the oldest known to 
the English world, dating far back of the feudal 
system, seems very curious to modern eyes. It 
did not much attract the attention of lawyers in its 
time. Questions regarding it were settled almost 
whoU}^ in the petty court of manor or township, 
and the great jurists had no call to discuss it. As 
a general rule it was a subordinate kind of land- 
holding. The town community was tenant, as a 
whole, to the owner of the manor. The manor 
ownership might be litigated, might be taken 
away by violence, but the town held of the lord 
of the manor, whoever he might be, from time to 
which the memory of man runs not. If the owner- 
ship of the land came into question, it was as a 
whole. In this way it escaped almost entirely 
the notice of the land courts and of the older 
writers on the law of land. But as it went out of 
existence the township community began to at- 
tract the attention of the learned. Who should 
have the commons? What rights had the lord of 
the manor and the people under new conditions ? 
And then inquiries were made by the curious into 
the origin of the commune, and presently a great 
literature has grown up about it mostly in a life- 
time. Efforts have been made to connect it with 
similar forms in other countries. The great fact 
coming out in all this discussion is that the town 
commune was very primitive. It can be traced in 



Chap. VI. 



Communal 

holding 

primitive. 



278 



The Trmisit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 



The 

village 

commune. 



Note 5. 



England back to the fifth century. It disappears 
in the prehistoric past in its full vigor. A consid- 
erable portion of the surface of England was culti- 
vated in this way in the seventeenth century, and 
it shows how far human development can be car- 
ried without breaking an ancient shell of society. 



IV. 

What was this village commune? Setting aside 
the disputed points in its ancient history — whether 
the commune was a combination at first of serfs, 
or whether it was a free mark — it seems prob- 
able that it once held all its territory in common, 
and that at the earliest period the arable land 
was allotted annually. The advancement of civili- 
zation relaxed the severity of this communism. 
Little patches were dealt out permanently to resi- 
dents, or at least to shareholders, but the division 
of land retained marks of the older order. The 
land of a single owner was scattered over the lands 
of the town apparently as last divided. The mead- 
ow, the pasture, the mast land, and the woodland 
remained an undivided common when William 
Marshall began the study of it in the latter part 
of the eighteenth century. The fences and gates 
were kept up by the proportionate care of the sev- 
eral cultivators, and the rents of the lord were paid 
by the " town " as a whole. In New England, 
where there was no lord, a town registry was es- 
tablished, and the town held the disposal of land in 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



279 



its own hands. " The furlongs " — that is, the " fur- 
row-longs " — were held by each household, were 
fenced in a common field, and often for the first 
years of settlement were held undivided and al- 
lotted year by year. Each person had his " home- 
lot right "and "acre right" in the undivided mead- 
ow, forest, and upland. These were at first sold 
as a unit, and were termed " an accommodation." 
The times of planting and of turning in of cattle 
were sometimes regulated in " field meetings " or 
" side meetings," after the immemorial usage of the 
English township. The common fields were in 
primitive towns but three. Two were in different 
sorts of grain, the third was taking its year of rest 
as a sheep and cow pasture. Each cultivator had 
to raise the crop decided on by the majority in the 
side meeting or field meeting. It was an animated 
scene in a common field when all the commune 
was planting or harvesting. There were New 
England towns that went back to the original 
norm of the town, and cultivated the land by 
dividing it annually until the town should fill up. 
Then when the town was fuller, they divided their 
arable land, giving each an equal chance. Society 
was prone to fall apart in a new country. The 
town community held it together in common help- 
fulness. 

V. 

Agricultural villages were yet flourishing in 
England in the seventeenth century. Very many 
19 



Chap. VI. 



Note 6. 



The com- 
mune in 
England. 



280 



The Trajisit of Civilization. 



had gone down before the cupidity of sheep-rais- 
ing landlords, but the greater part were yet in full 
vigor under one and another shelter. Some seem 
to have kept a stiff proportion of their ancient 
rights. We find ducking stool and pillory in one 
rustic town ; in Queen Mary's days there re- 
mained a prison and gallows in another. Persons 
seeking justice outside the borough for any matter 
occurring in the borough should lose their entire 
freedom — that is, their right of property in the 
community. Even in Connecticut one finds the 
right to appeal to higher courts was hampered and 
jealously watched. In England the townships in 
James I's time looked to overlords for protection. 
Some were resolutely independent. 



VI. 

That the New-Englanders were largely born to 
the commune is evident. They were mostly farm- 
ers, and farmers in that time were frequently 
found in village communes. Perhaps the small 
farmer was more susceptible to Puritanism ; per- 
haps the condition of the towns was favorable to 
the spread of Puritanism. Threatened with in- 
closure of their " wastes " — their mast land, their 
woodland, and their meadow — these villagers em- 
braced the religion of the discontented. In New 
England the origin of the commune was soon for- 
gotten. In the time of the Revolution we find 
John Adams proposing to inquire who among the 



I 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



281 



fathers of Massachusetts suggested this mode of 
settlement. He had no notion of its English ori- 
gin. From the first, Plymouth was organized 
somewhat on the communal model. Salem, after 
trying independent holdings awhile, adopted the 
same plan. The great migration of Winthrop 
seems to have brought along with it the plan of 
the village community as the very best one on 
which to settle Puritan churches and congrega- 
tions. If it was predetermined, it was a master- 
stroke of policy ; but whether it was a matter of 
forethought or not, the townsmen must many of 
them have been acquainted with it. Nearly the 
whole of New England adopted the same plan. 
From I know not how far east clear down the 
coast to Connecticut and Long Island, and down 
the Jersey coast to Delaware, the people organized 
in this way. One never hears any other plan pro- 
posed. The phraseolog}' of the town community 
was theirs. The swineherd or hogreeve went 
through the town blowing an early morning horn, 
the cowherd, the goatherd, the gooseherd, the 
shepherd were all present, as needed in various 
New England towns. There were water bailiffs, 
there were drummers to call people to meeting 
and to make announcements, there were overseers 
of chimneys and of chimney sweepers, perambu- 
lators, cullers of staves and corders of wood, fire- 
wards and haywards or hedgewards, and all the 
half a hundred other occasional officers of the 
town. Their names passed easily from one to 



Chap. VI. 



282 



The Transit of Civilization. 



another, like coins worn smooth. One thing they 
missed — it was the lord and his rents. But when 
a Connecticut town moved to Newark they easily 
spoke of the quitrents as the lord's half-penny. It 
would have been the lord's penny in England. 



VII. 

The land was distributed with more or less 
equality in some towns and with more or less 
inequality in others. The houses stood rather 
compactly about the meeting-house. Every man 
had his home lot, his share in the cultivated field, 
his right to feed his cows in the common pasture 
and in common fields when crops were off, and so 
on, duly awarded him. A part of the fence or a 
gate, a pair of bars or " a lift " was assigned to 
him to keep up. The town owned the realty and 
divided it according to its by-laws and its owi 
good pleasure. There were town cows some-l 
times, there was always a town bull, and a town] 
horse was kept at Salem. Town sheep were not 
uncommon ; a herd of two thousand paid all thej 
corporate expenses of a certain town in Connecti-j 
cut. The town sometimes kept packs of dogs to 
hunt wolves with. The tradespeople who wished 
to settle within the bounds of the town made 
bargains with the "selectmen" or others having 
charge of "the prudentials of the town" for a] 
monopoly. Its mill sites and other privileges were 
disposed of in this way, the townspeople agreeing! 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



283 



to help build the mill ; to a blacksmith they gave 
a monopoly. The ideas prevailing- were rustic ; 
we read of one village which had reached a transi- 
tion stage and which was alarmed lest the com- 
munity should be " ruinated " by the influx of peo- 
ple. It is to be remembered that no New-Eng- 
lander, unless from choice, was solitary. He was 
always a member of a community and therefore 
civilized. Thus grew New England. 



VIII. 

The word town underwent a change in New 
England, or at least a provincial sense became the 
main sense of the word. It did not mean at first a 
town, but a group of farmers engaged in agricul- 
ture on a particular plan. The New England vil- 
lage was almost precisely the same at the outset as 
the English farming community. But it was in a 
new country where there is a chance to change, 
where change is inevitable. In the first place, the 
township in Massachusetts took on governmental 
functions. It became the political unit ; this was 
its capital change. Deputies were elected to the 
Legislature from the " towns," large and small. 
The counties sank into insignificance, the towns 
were the sources of power. In the next place, the 
town boundary was also the boundary of the par- 
ish. The parish in Massachusetts was of primary 
importance. And, in the third place, the rulers, 
finding themselves freed from some of the cares of 



Chap. VI. 
Note 10. 



Political 
impor- 
tance of 
the town. 



284 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 



Society in 
the South. 



government by the autonomy of the towns, made 
even the farms attachments to the several towns. 
The town meeting, from being a side meeting to 
assign a date for the putting in and out of cows, 
became a place where the very sources of political 
power lay. The leading magistrates were out- 
voted by the representatives of the towns over 
and over. This was unexpected in a day when the 
magistrate was reverenced as the appointed of the 
Lord. The magistrates offered strong resistance, 
but the stronger resistance of the commons would 
not down. Efforts were made to overrule the 
lower House, but the deputies, having got the bit 
in their teeth, carried things their own way, and 
then the government fell into the hands of the 
towns, or rather, as has been said, into the hands 
of the churches, whose members did all the voting. 



IX. 

r 
The custom of granting farms in the first gen- 
eration to prominent citizens in return for the 
assistance given in colony planting was discon- 
tinued. In the rivalry between independent 
towns and farms the towns by natural selection 
won the day. The prominent man, a little more 
eminent than the others, was content to take a 
larger share in the town instead of a separate 
grant. After the first generation there were 
fewer men of distinction engaged in planting 
towns, and hence fewer occasions for special 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



285 



grants. The New-Englander became exceed- 
ingly fond of the town system ; he did not think 
of doing without it. Everywhere that New-Eng- 
landers went in the first and later generations the 
town system went with them. But it did not else- 
where acquire any such prominence as in Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut. There were no political 
privileges, and the church was not of the prevail- 
ing order. Long Island, New Jersey, and certain 
regions in the Delaware Bay all had the inevi- 
table town plan. One or two churches moved 
away into South Carolina and Georgia, where 
their village plan was lost in the larger agricul- 
ture of the South. If we had the evidence that is 
perhaps lost, we should find that the township or 
village community could be found germinating in 
the Southern colonies. Such a sub-colony as that 
of Barkly or Berkley, to which an " incorporacion 
by some vsuall or fit name " was promised, must 
have contemplated common lands and other ele- 
ments of the commune. That and its rustic ally the 
hundred, and its civic type the borough, were the 
form in which nearly all the local government of 
England was cast. But nearly all the men of Barkly 
perished at the hands of the Indians or otherwise. 
Indian massacres, the growth of a staple demand- 
ing much land, and the consequent rapid develop- 
ment of territorial greed, soon destroyed every 
vestige of the town in Virginia. A " hundred " in 
1660 proved that a "commons" had been granted 
to it in 163 1. If we look to Maryland it is hard 



Chap. VI. 



Note II. 



Note 12. 

Smith of 
Nibley 
MSS., 57. 

Note 13. 



286 



The Transit of Civilizatiofi. 



to make out whether manors with " courts leet " 
established there very early had jurisdiction of 
commons, as is probable from the usual organi- 
zation of a manor. But the circumstances were 
most unfavorable to the community ; the great 
staple of tobacco set people's teeth on edge to 
become rich out of it. Cultivation almost from 
the start began to change its character. Great 
and greater shiploads of bond servants, free-will- 
ers, kids, and convicts were unloaded in Virginia 
and Maryland and sold for four years' service. 
For half a century or more large estates with 
white bond servants were the rule. In 1670 there 
were three times as many white bond servants as 
blacks in Virginia. Within ten or fifteen years 
after that, as the century drew to a close, Virginia 
ceased to buy white servants in any numbers, and 
plantations worked by black servants became the 
rule. 

X. 

A very usual method of holding land in Eng- 
land was by the manorial system. The manors 
were entailed to the eldest son or other heir of the 
manor lord. But parts of these manors were vil- 
lage communities from the most ancient times. In 
New England they made village communities 
without any lord of the manor, and quitrents were 
left out of the count. The granting of farms quite 
independent of the town contemplated another 
English mode of landholding. But just as agri- 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



287 



cultural villages were crowded out in Virginia, so 
were independent farms driven to the wall in the 
Northeast. An order went forth that farms should 
belong to the towns in which they were situated. 
It was inconvenient to have them separate. The 
Church was the drilling ground to keep the peo- 
ple strictly in line with advanced Protestantism. 
The farmer could have no rights in common 
fields, his cattle were foreign to the pasture, his 
pigs had no right to pick up nuts from the com- 
mon woodland, he had no acre rights when divi- 
dends were made, but he must attend the town 
church and pay the dues levied upon him for the 
clergy and other town burdens, and all burdens 
were put directly on the town. Individuals were 
unknown, the town was the taxpayer and the land- 
owner. Sometimes, as at Salem, the town bought 
out a man's holdings, his " accommodation," ex- 
changing therefor a farmstead carved out of the 
great unappropriated wilderness. But the favor- 
ite method of settling land came to be in a colony 
or town. By this means the ecclesiastical power 
was greatly augmented. The minister was usually 
the one educated man in the parish. He knew 
some Latin and Greek, and he had even a smatter- 
ing of Hebrew. He was educated in what was 
the only branch of knowledge affected by minister 
or layman — theology. His dominance over the 
unlettered was tolerably complete. On the other 
hand, the Southern planter, with long stretches of 
woodland between him and his neighbors, could 



Chap. VI. 



288 



The Transit of Civilization. 



cultivate his wide fields in almost entire independ- 
ence ; his code of morals even was mostly his own, 
but his public interests were as extensive as his 
county or his province. This state of society be- 
got self-reliance, and produced more leading states- 
men than the other ; but the people lacked the 
New England cohesion and susceptibilitv to or- 
ganization, without which the statesmanship of the 
Revolution would have been vain. The South- 
erner, from his isolation and from other causes, be- 
came hospitable, eager for society, and in general 
spontaneously friendly and generous ; the New 
England people became close-fisted and shrewd in 
trade ; it is a trait of village life. But the benevo- 
lence of New England was more effective than 
that of the South, because it was organized and 
systematic. The village life of the extreme North 
trained the people to trade, and led to commercial 
development, and it made popular education pos- 
sible. The sons of the great planters at the South 
were averse to commerce ; they were also the 
most liberally educated and polished in manners of 
all the colonists ; but the scattered common people 
could have few schools, and were generally rude 
and ignorant, even when compared with the lower 
class of New-Englanders, who stood a chance of 
getting some rough schooling, besides a certain 
education from the meeting-house and the ever- 
recurrinof town debates. 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



289 



XL 

A stranger might in old New England find a 
constable at the door some morning to warn him to 
leave. He was not expected to go, but his landlord 
must give security that he would not be charge- 
able, or at least the town was quit of him. Peo- 
ple attracted by the superior medical skill of Bos- 
ton physicians were thus warned. St. Clement's 
Manor, in Maryland, at its Court Leet, orders John 
Mansell "to remove his inmate or give security." 
The towns had done so from the most remote times. 
Even in the Salic law, a thousand years before, no 
person was suffered to remove from one villa to 
another. A trace of this is found in the Connecti- 
cut law that " noe Inhabitant shall have power to 
make sale of his accomodation of house and lands 
vntil he have first propounded the sale thereof to the 
Towne . . . and they refuse to accept of the sale 
tendered." The town community is dead in New 
England, though its methods of government re- 
main, and even in the West and South there are 
traces of it in the language. In the old common 
field, strips were allotted from year to year, but one 
piece of land belonged to nobody. It was called 
" Jack's Land." Here the plowman left his plow, 
his hoe, his seed to the hospitality of an undefined 
somebody called Jack. The author of " Wonder- 
working Providence," a New England captain, calls 
Ireland " Jack's Land." It was nobody's country ; 
one man and one party after another might take 



Chap. VI. 



Strangers 
forbidden. 



Old Md. 
Manors, 15. 



Seebohm, 
The Salic 
Law, 359, 
360. 
Rogers, 
Work and 
Wages, 
107. 

1 Conn. 

Rec.,3Si, 

1660. 



290 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 



Note 14. 



The Vir- 
ginia 
parish. 

MS. Rec- 
ords of 
various 
parishes, in 
Fairfax 
Seminary. 

Note 15. 

Accomac 
Records, 
1632. 



Records 
of Petsoe 
Parish, in 
Fairfax 
Seminary. 



possession. Curiously enough, the word survives 
in America in an old game, played on a slate, 
where all drawn games are credited to " Jack," 
and are marked in a division called " Jack's Land." 
It is the very last attenuated ghost of the ideas of 
the ancient commune. 



XII. 

In Virginia and the South the parish vestry 
took the place of the township in New England. 
Virginia was the Southern model as Massachusetts 
was the Northern. In the extant parish records of 
Virginia the vestry makes a contract for building a 
church, ordains a referendum for locating a church, 
and employs and dismisses a minister, builds a pal- 
ing fence about the church, and " distreynes " for 
tithes. The vestry also opens roads, appoints over- 
seers of roads and holds them to account, levies 
fines for bastardy and concubinage and for disor- 
der in church, orders the land processioned, re- 
lieves the poor, binds out " orphants," appoints 
side men or collectors, and objects to the admis- 
sion of non-residents lest they be chargeable. The 
parish also in one case elects a " select vestrye " 
from each of three precincts. In 1694 Petsoe Par- 
ish divides itself into eight precincts for the pro- 
cessioning of land. Here is nearly everything that 
was done by the New England town transacted by 
the vestry of a Virginia parish. The parish in 
Virginia stretched far — usually over an entire 



Land and Labor i?t the Early Colonies. 



291 



county ; in New England it was restricted to a 
town. 

The processioning of land was observed by 
the Virginians between Easter and Whitsunday. 
They made formal processions about the bounds 
of their several tracts, renewing the marks in the 
line trees. When a division line had been thus 
marked three times it was no longer open to ques- 
tion. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Long 
Island the townships, as landholders, were " to go 
the rounds " at regular intervals. Each individual 
owner of plowland and mowland within the town 
must trace his boundary every winter if his adja- 
cent neighbor exacted it. The colonists were thus 
following a custom whose origin was lost in the 
obscurity before written records. 



XIII. 

The leadership of the great families was sus- 
tained in New York and in the colonies south 
of Pennsylvania by primogeniture — the preroga- 
tive of the eldest son to inherit the landed estate 
in case the father left no will. Custom followed 
the law, and fathers who willed their property 
usually left most or all of the land to the eldest 
son, as belonging to him by prescriptive right. 
To primogeniture the aristocratic colonies added 
the dead hand of entail, b}'- which the land was 
sent down for generations in the line of the eldest 
male. Even a clumsy fiction, called in law " com- 



Chap. VI. 



Inherit- 
ance. 



292 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 



Plymouth 
Records. 



mon recovery," by which the entail might be 
broken in England, was forbidden by statute in 
Virginia, and was not accounted applicable to the 
other colonies. 

The Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Massachu- 
setts Puritans had belonged to that politico-re- 
ligious party in England which sought the abo- 
lition of certain old abuses. As early as 1636 
Plymouth enacted that land should be held after 
" the laudable custom, tenure, and hold of the 
manor of East Greenwich " — that is, in an ancient 
Saxon way preserved at the coming of William the 
Conqueror by the county of Kent. One character- 
istic of this tenure was that it divided the lands 
equally among the sons in case there was no will. 
Massachusetts, which expressly abolished many of 
the worst features of feudal tenure, by name, gave 
to the eldest son a double portion according to 
the Mosaic code, but divided the rest among 
daughters as well as sons. This system prevailed 
throughout New England. Primogeniture had 
come to be esteemed a natural right, and the Mas- 
sachusetts leaders felt obliged more than once to 
defend themselves from the charge of having " de- 
nied the right of the eldest son." They answered 
by showing the comparative insignificance of land 
in a new country, and took refuge behind the ex- 
ample of Moses. Pennsylvania took the same mid- 
dle course of sheltering innovation under the law 
of Moses by giving the eldest son a double por- 
tion. The laws of some of the colonies made the 



La7id and Labor in the Early Colofiies. 



293 



land liable, to a greater or less extent, with per- 
sonal estate for the debts of the deceased, which 
robbed the eldest of a part of his " insolent pre- 
rogative " ; but it was not until the shock of the 
Revolution that primogeniture and entail were 
swept away, under the leadership of Jefferson and 
others. But land was so abundant that a thrifty 
younger son often earned in a lifetime a better 
portion than his elder brother. The eldest son's 
double portion in New England survived the 
Revolution for some years. A very ancient mode 
of inheritance prevailed in some English boroughs, 
called among lawyers "borough English." By this 
custom the lands descended to the youngest son. 
It found no lodgment in the laws of the colonies, 
so far as I know ; but in New Hampshire it was a 
widespread custom to leave the homestead to the 
youngest, who remained at home and cared for the 
old age of his parents. This reasonable form of 
the custom of " ultimogeniture " lingers yet in cer- 
tain parts of the country, as, for example, in some 
of the northern counties of New York. The other 
custom of a widow inheriting a third of her hus- 
band's estate is even more widely prevalent, and is 
a matter of law in most of the States. 



XIV. 

The problem of England in the days of James I 
was how to be rid of its poor. They had, many of 
them, been turned out of a living by the inclosure 



Chap. VI. 



Note 16. 



Belknap's 
New 
Hamp- 
shire. 



Serfdom 
and ap- 
prentice- 
ship. 



294 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 

Note 17. 



Harrison 
in Holin- 
shed, 1,314. 



Note 18. 



of commons in the mania for sheep husbandry, and 
some of them had had the villages pulled down 
about their ears. They were sent a-wandering, 
living as they could live by hook or by crook. 
Necessity made many of them rogues, and the de- 
sire to have done with rogues was so intense that 
England hanged its thieves out of hand. Henry 
VIII thought to be rid of such vermin of society, 
and he hanged, if we may believe Harrison, two- 
and-seventy thousand, including "great theeves, 
pettie theeves and roges." In Elizabeth's reign 
three or four hundred felons were eaten up annu- 
ally by the gallows, and James I merrily carried on 
the work of extermination ; one reads of " twenty 
hanged up at a clap," in one place. But the vaga- 
bonds did not grow fewer. 

Recent serfdom had left its mark on the poor 
man. He had been freed, not from benevolence, 
nor from any motive having regard to the per- 
sonality of the serf. Wickliffe and others had 
taught that it was meritorious to free a man from 
bondage who was a Christian — that is, who had 
been baptized. This scruple fitted to the churchly 
conscience of the age ; it grew more and more^ 
exigeant. " We think it pious and meritorious wit! 
God to make certain persons absolutely free fromj 
the yoke of servitude who are at present undei 
villenage to us," said Henry VIII. Elizabeth and| 
James, less scrupulous on this point, proposed tc 
sell to those whose blood was tainted with slaverj 
the privileges of freedom. It was not till the! 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



295 



eighteenth century had dawned that Chamber- 
layne's State of England, an annual publication, 
could drop its set phrase, " but few now in Eng- 
land," and say, " Now slavery is entirely thrown 
away and every Servant Man or Woman are prop- 
erly hired Servants." But the habit of regarding 
the peasant as a recent serf had its influence in the 
treatment of him. 

The " spirit," who was later called a crimp, was 
on the watch for him. Did they need more sol- 
diers in Flanders ? The spirit, by means best 
known to himself, packed off the poor man to Flan- 
ders. He was equally ready to ship him to any 
other country for a reward. The Virginia colony 
began to ask for people. The wilderness was hun- 
gry for laborers. The spirit shipped little chil- 
dren by the score down the Thames and off for 
America. Parents followed the vessels all the way 
to Gravesend, but the law would not help them ; 
Virginia wanted laborers. Sometimes a parent 
could pay enough to get the lad released. Men 
were carried also to that abode of hopelessness. 
From the first there were two general classes : 
free apprentices and convicts mostly for petty 
crimes. " Apprentices," says Chamberlayne, " are 
a sort of servant that carry the mask of Pure vil- 
lains or Bond slaves, differing however in that 
Apprentices are slaves only for a term and by 
covenant." 



Chap. VI. 

Chamber- 
layne, 
1696-1702. 



Note 19. 



20 



296 



The Transit of Civilisation. 



Chap. VI. 



Servants 
in the 
colonies. 



Donne's 
MS. 



See note 
16, chapter 

V. 

Compare 
Diary of 
John Har- 
rower ; 
Am. Hist. 
Rev., vi, 
No. I. 



XV. 

From the outset there were in New England as 
well as in Virginia apprenticed servants, who had 
been bound for a long term before leaving Eng- 
land, and were treated as a recognized species of 
property. Winthrop speaks of the " money " the 
three hundred servants had cost that they were 
enforced to set free for want of food. Cradock 
and others who did not come to New England 
sent servants to take care of estates for them. In 
1629 De Vries, the Dutch traveler, saw English 
men and women staked and lost at cards, and he 
bluntly told the Virginians that he had " never 
seen such work in Turk or Barbarian." George 
Donne, the author of a manuscript in the Bodleian, 
saw servants brought to Virginia by the shipload 
after 1630, and he describes the horrors of the 
traffic, their insufficient food, their ragged and 
barefoot condition, and their landing far from their 
destination and being forced to march the rest of 
the way in their enfeebled state. Nearly all the 
emigrants that came between 1620 and 1650 were 
bondsmen. This does not imply that they were 
not some of them educated, for many Latin-school 
men were obliged to sell themselves to the crimp. 
After the Restoration servants were sold in great 
numbers to Virginia. Fifteen hundred a year is 
the estimate of Berkeley at a time when Virginia 
contained but two thousand black slaves. As the 
term was for four years, there were six thousand 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonics. 



297 



white slaves always in bondage there. Before 
1650 the term of some was ten years or more, and 
that of many was seven or eight years. After 
the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 the term of 
service was permanently reduced to four years. 



XVI, 

English laborers bound themselves to serve a 
term of years, fairly hoping to better their condi- 
tion in America ; and men in domestic or other 
trouble would sell themselves for a term of service 
in the plantations, plunging into the abyss and 
trusting to luck to come up in better plight in a 
new world. Husbands forsaking their wives lost 
their identity in the transport ship, and wives 
fleeing from unbearable husbands were swallowed 
up in the flood. Runaway children and fleeing ap- 
prentices were greedily welcomed by the crimps ; 
felons and prison breakers pursued by hue and cry 
were quickly safe on board. In those days of slow 
communication, renegades of every sort were as 
utterly lost to their old lives in America as they 
could have been had they migrated to the moon. 
It was an age of flogging ; criminals, soldiers, 
sailors, pupils, children, and now and then even 
wives, were thought the better for scourging. 
One ought hardly to be surprised, therefore, at 
the numerous and cruel whippings of English 
servants, women as well as men, who were 
scourged naked with hickory rods and washed 



Chap. VI. 



Fate of 
servants. 



298 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Chap. VI. 



with brine ; the punishment continuing sometimes 
at intervals for hours, or being renewed day after 
day. There were also in use, by masters and over- 
seers, thumbscrews, sweatings, and other such 
devil's devices. The food allowed was sometimes 
a scant diet of Indian meal. The sick servant was 
neglected lest the doctor's charge should exceed 
the value of his remaining service ; and one thrifty 
master in Maryland required a servant, sick of a 
mortal disease, to dig his own grave in advance, in 
order to save the other men's time. In 1705 Vir- 
ginia prohibited the secret burial of servants and 
the whipping of " Christian white servants " naked, 
without the consent of a justice. Great numbers 
fled away from the sharpness of bondage, taking the 
risk of cruel punishments and an extension of their 
terms if captured. During the existence of New 
Netherland, Dutch servants broke away to New 
England or Maryland, while English servants from 
both directions made their way to the Dutch terri- 
tory. With New England the Dutch had at one 
time a treaty for the return of those " who carried 
their passports under their feet." To get away on 
shipboard, to seize a shallop and make off to a neigh- 
boring colony, and represent themselves as ship- 
wrecked mariners, and to fly to the Indians, were 
favorite devices of runaways. So great was the 
number of fugitives that "inferior persons" were 
always liable to arrest on suspicion. North Caro- 
lina was filled with runaways from Virginia. In 
1663 a dangerous conspiracy of indentured servants 



Land and Labor in the Early Colotiies. 



299 



was discovered in Virginia, and a general fear of 
the class, among whom were many desperate char- 
acters, probably prompted much of the severe treat- 
ment inflicted on bondmen. The Pilgrims found 
that servants led astray " the unstaid and young." 
The Massachusetts colonists before starting essayed 
at considerable cost to sift their servants, excluding 
a corrupt element ; they even sent back two boys 
who had shown vicious propensities on shipboard. 
But the large proportion of penalties meted out to 
servants during the first years of the colonies shows 
how slight was the effect of the sifting process. 
Even in the colonies where the convict element 
was shut out, many of the servants were obtained 
from dangerous classes, such as "sturdy beggars, 
gypsies, and other incorrigible rogues, idle and 
debauched persons." They could " eat till they 
sweat and work till they freeze," in the quaint 
words of a traveler in New England. It was prob- 
ably from those who had been servants that the 
sea rovers fitting out in the colonies found recruits. 
The pirate James, when short of hands, lay off the 
Virginia coast and captured transport ships, many 
of the convicts and servants in them preferring to 
risk a halter in cruising " on the grand account " 
to pining in colonial bondage. In some instances 
the criminal transports rose and slaughtered the 
crew, taking the ship into some out-of-the-way har- 
bor and escaping. The degradation of the women 
servants was a continual source of evil ; laws were 
made to correct their immoralities, and other laws 



300 



The Transit of Civilization. 



to prevent these " Christians " from intermarrying 
with the heathen Africans. In all the colonies there 
were those brought as servants, even as convicts, 
who rose to wealth through industry and frugality, 
two virtues on which a new land pays high pre- 
mium. Some founded families that attained to 
honor and influence. 

XVII. 

The severity of English penal laws occasioned 
evasions of all kinds ; for Anglo-Saxon people pre- 
fer to reform an abuse by avoidance rather than by 
direct abolition. The old provision for " benefit of 
clergy " was stretched to an absurd comprehensive- 
ness. The need for men in the colonies offered a 
new opportunity for merciful evasions of the death 
penalty in cases of minor felony. It became com- 
mon to pardon thieves on condition of their accept- 
ing a seven years' term of service in the colonies, 
and the English State-Paper Office has many curi- 
ous petitions for this commutation. As early as 
1622 a horse thief indicates that he much prefers 
service in Virginia to hanging. At a later period 
a husband is found petitioning on behalf of his 
wife, condemned to death for stealing three-and- 
sixpence, that she might be transported to any 
plantation. After the Restoration it was enacted 
that justices, at their discretion, might send " loose 
and disorderly persons " to the colonies, and at in- 
tervals a hundred or so of " Newgate birds " were 
taken in a close lighter from Blackfriars to Wool- 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



301 



wich, where they were put aboard ship for 
America. 

Bristol was the chief center of the colonial 
trade ; here even the small traders and some- 
times the peddlers had ventures in the colonies. 
Bristol, therefore, naturally took the lead in the 
servant trade, and most of the great officers of 
the city became involved in kidnapping. When, 
in Bristol, a man was on trial for some small, crime, 
the petty officers would persuade him to beg for 
transportation in order to escape being hanged. 
These transports were then assigned to the mayor 
and each of the aldermen in turn, who sold them 
to the plantations, and grew rich from the spoils 
of the poor and the desperate. In the most para- 
doxical scene in judicial history the worst of 
judges, George Jeffreys, himself reeking with cor- 
ruptions and cruelties incredible, is found arraign- 
ing aldermen of this opulent city for their share in 
this trade. Ordering the scarlet-robed mayor from 
his seat on the bench to a place in the prisoner's 
dock, he cried, with brutal exultation, " See how 
the kidnapping rogue looks ! " He ranted at the 
aldermen in words too vile to be reprinted. Yet 
the selling of condemned men and the condemning 
of men that they might be sold were practiced 
openly at the court of James II at this very time. 
The ladies of the queen's bedchamber and the 
queen herself eagerly snatched at the profits from 
the sale of the rebels of Monmouth's rebellion, 
whom Jeffreys had just then condemned ; even 



302 



The Transit of Civilization. 



William Penn begged for twenty of them for the 
Philadelphia market. 

XVIII. 

In 1619 a " Holland man-of-war," short of water 
and food, put into the James River, and cast an- 
chor before the only English settlement on this 
side of the globe. The captain was forbidden to 
land, but as he threatened to throw overboard 
some slaves captured in the West Indies, Captain 
Kendall, commanding at Jamestown, exchanged 
some " presents " for them. These fourteen " ne- 
gars " were the first slaves in English America. 
The opening of new settlements and the lighting 
upon new staple products produced a demand for 
unskilled labor which the English " spirits " or 
crimps could not adequately supply. Negroes 
were therefore brought from the West Indies, and 
afterward direct from Africa or Madagascar. The 
labor of slaves increased the ability of the colonies 
to " take off " English goods ; it is therefore not 
surprising that a Committee on Foreign Planta- 
tions, soon after the Restoration, declared that 
" black slaves were the most useful appurtenances 
of a plantation." 

The English serfs had received their freedom 
chiefly on theological grounds as fellow-Chris- 
tians, with some additional weight thrown into the 
scale by their being fellow-Englishmen. But free- 
born Englishmen were by custom sold into severe 
bondage for long terms, and even sent beyond seas 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



303 



in large numbers ; there could, therefore, be no 
repugnance in the minds of the colonists to the 
enslavement of blacks, who were not only pagans, 
but so different in appearance as to seem to be 
another species, not entitled to human considera- 
tion. At least, if they came from Adam, they 
were by some theological experts identified with 
the cursed descendants of Cain, for Ham was 
thougfht to have found a wife in the land of Nod. 



XIX. 

Slavery is more ancient than historic records. 
In the centuries of warfare between Christians and 
Mohammedans, the practice of enslaving captives 
outlawed by their " infidelity " had prevailed. Ne- 
groes were easily confounded with the Moors, and 
thousands of blacks were annually brought into 
Europe for sale as early as the middle of the fif- 
teenth century; and a century later, in 1553, one 
finds four-and-twenty of them brought as far as 
England, From Spain first, and then directly 
from Africa, black slaves had been carried to 
the Spanish colonies to develop the mines. The 
Royal African Company of England announced 
to Charles II, in 1663, that the very existence of 
the plantations depended on an adequate supply of 
negro servants ; and though their declaration was 
due to cupidity, it was at least true that all rich 
and successful American colonies up to this time 
had possessed slaves. So late as 1735 the Lords 



304 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Commissioners of Trade declared that the colonies 
" could not possibly subsist " without an adequate 
supply of slaves. Indeed, the first effect of the 
introduction of slaves was a rapid advancement in 
subduing forests and opening sources of wealth. 

For nearly sixty years after the beginning of 
negro slavery here, there seems to have been no 
scruple or question about it. The lifelong bond- 
age of negroes was tacitly justified by their hea- 
then condition. When, in 1677, the question was 
first raised in an English court, Africans were held 
to be slaves by the custom of merchants and " as 
being infidels." This notion was so general that 
very many planters resisted efforts to instruct their 
slaves in the Christian religion, lest baptism should 
emancipate them. To remove this obstacle the 
Virginia Assembly had enacted, in 1667, that the 
conversion of a slave should not invalidate the 
owner's claim to his services, and similar laws 
were afterward made in most of the other prov- 
inces. But these laws were merely of colonial 
authority, and were not sufficient to overcome the 
scruple of covetousness. A proposal from Eng- 
land to encourage the conversion of the negroes 
" would not go down " with the New York Assem- 
bly in 1699. Philanthropic exertion for the negro 
was at first wholly religious, seeking his conver- 
sion not so much for the good of the negro as for 
the glory of Christianity. The attention of James 
II having been called to the pagan condition of the 
negroes, he resolved at the council board, in 1685, 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



305 



that all the slaves in the plantation should be chris- 
tened ; the thought of baptizing them in a mass b}^ 
royal order, whether they would or no, was no 
doubt doubly pleasing to him as a zealot and as a 
lover of arbitrary methods. Efforts to convert the 
slaves in the seventeenth century were few and 
languid, the most notable being those of the super- 
annuated Eliot, in Massachusetts. There were a 
few individuals who, like William Penn in 1700, 
had " a concern for the souls of the blacks " ; but 
many held them to be quite without souls, and 
hence not proper objects of concern. 



XX. 

The first voice in America to speak against the 
perpetual bondage of man to man was heard in 
a memorial of some Friends of Germantown in 
Pennsylvania. This protest, in vigorous broken 
English, was addressed to the Philadelphia Yearly 
Meeting in 1688, and it opened an agitation which 
resulted, seventy years later, in bringing the Phila- 
delphia Quakers to a conclusion opposed to slave- 
holding. In the fundamental law of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, villanage and other feudal servi- 
tudes were prohibited, and in 1646 the Massachu- 
setts General Court actually undertook to send 
back to Africa negroes who had been kidnapped 
by a slaver, and to send with them a letter of 
apology and explanation. But the Calvinist rev- 
erence for the law of Moses was a less elastic 



3o6 



The Trajisit of Civilization. 



standard than the " inward light " of the follow- 
ers of Fox. If the early Puritan, bound to the 
letter of Scripture, was less likely to run into 
aberrant fanaticism than the Friend, he was also 
less quick to gain new and modern views of duty. 
Refusing to participate with " man-stealers," the 
textual conscience of the Massachusetts forefathers 
did not shrink from selling Indians captured in 
war into chattel slavery, or from buying slaves 
who appeared to have come into bondage other- 
wise than by downright kidnapping. These nice 
distinctions could not be kept up, and thousands 
of negro slaves were sold into New England 
without any question for conscience' sake. The 
scruple about human liberty with which the Puri- 
tan forefathers had come to this country had been 
swiftly forgotten. Some merchants of Boston were 
engaged in the Guinea trade, of which, however, 
Newport was the great center. Before the anti- 
slavery writings of the Quakers, Hepburn, Bur- 
ling, Lay, and Sandiford, had appeared, an influen- 
tial but rather timid voice, that of Judge Sewall, 
was heard opposing the importation of slaves to 
Massachusetts. He had been led by the narrow 
theological spirit in which he was bred into griev- 
ous mistakes in the witchcraft trials, but he was an 
honest and even a scrupulous man. Fond of popu- 
lar favor and shrinking from censure, it cost him a 
struggle no doubt to give to the press, in 1700, his 
little tract against the slave trade, entitled The Sell- 
ing of Joseph. Its influence was probably not great. 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



307 



So closed the seventeenth century. The prog- 
ress in humanity had been very slight. The num- 
ber of bond servants was constantly increasing ; 
the black tide of African slavery w^as ever swell- 
ing. No voice worthy of the name was yet heard 
in protest. 

Elucidations. 

"'Fine and recovery,' 'conveyance to uses,' 'lease and re- 
leases ' — all the circuitous forms that evasion had been compelled 
to assume — survived, together with the whole storehouse of fac- 
titious science that had grown up round them. Once launched 
into existence, the system of private and unregistered conveyance 
had generated a science and a vocabulary applicable to the num- 
berless ' estates ' created in law, which made every title a matter 
of intimate personal history ; hence arose the necessity of investi- 
gations requiring the most practiced and recondite knowledge of 
the old body of statute law which feudalism had left behind it." 
Hoskyns, The Land Laws of England, in Systemsof Land Tenure, 
p. 183. 

See the note on p. 482 of Hening, vol. i, on the alternate for- 
bidding and licensing of lawyers in Virginia. In 1642 the new 
governor had things his own way and admitted attorneys ; in 1645 
mercenary attorneys were expelled, in 1647 the act was made 
stronger, in 1656 all acts against mercenaiy attorneys were re- 
pealed, and in 1658 a vote of total expulsion was taken. 

" The particular usages of the Saxons, however, were very 
similar to the present. The twig and turf were the simplest 
method of livery, and by the twig and turf did they give seizin 
to the purchaser. When grants were made to the church, a twig 
was usually laid on the altar. This occurred so frequently that 
it would be useless to cite instances in its support. A tree grow- 
ing on a soil was regarded as a part of it, hence a branch of it 
served to give seizin. . . . When Ulphus, king of Deira, gave 
lands to the church of York he ' took the horn, wherein he was 
wont to drink, and filling it with wine, kneeled before the altar ' 
and deposited it as a symbol of possession. ... In the time of 



Chap. VI. 



Note I, 
page 273. 



Note 2, 
page 273. 



Note 3, 
page 275. 



3o8 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Henry III, William Earl of Warrenne and Surrey, on a grant 
made by him to the priory of St. Pancrace, delivered seizin by the 
hair of his head." Watkins, Law of Tenures, pp. 8i, 82, note 
xxxiii. See the article on Charter Horns in Andrews's Old 
Church Lore. 

In some parts of England and Ireland tenures are by the cus- 
tom of some manors conveyed by a bit of rush, straw, or hay. I 
have this by report as to Ireland, and in the present day. See 
also the custom of Yetminster, Dorset, in Watkins on Copy- 
holds, 544. 

Private property in a strip in a common field came in only 
when fields become permanently arable. Nasse, 11. North Devon 
common lands were cultivated one or two years and then left to 
pasture in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Marshall's 
Rural Economy, 259. New England had land in considerable 
quantities reallotted every year at first. Land was still allotted 
thus in England in some places. It ought to be remarked here 
that Rhode Island was first organized into towns, and for a long 
time was a congeries of independent towns. From the vices of 
that system the State has not yet recovered. First Assembly of 
Rhode Island, 15. Rehoboth, on account of its remoteness, was 
for a long time virtually independent, and was built in a semi- 
circle. Newman's Rehoboth, 15, 16. In Stiles's manuscript I 
have seen an account of a town built in a circle about the 
church. 

Mr. Seebohm calls attention to the animated scene in the com- 
mon fields at the time of planting, as described by Piers Plough- 
man in the prologus : 

" A faire field full of folke fonde I there bytwene 
Of alle manner of men the mene and the riche 
Worchyng and wanderyng- as the world asketh." — Text B. 

Mr. Ashton, in his Humour, etc., of the Seventeenth Century, 
gives this : 

"A Lord, that purpos'd for his more availe 
To compass in a Common with a rayle, 
Was reckoning with his friend about the cost 
And charge of every rayle, and every post ; 
But he (that wisht his greedy humor crost ) 
Said, ' Sir, provide you Posts, and without sayling, 
Your neighbours round about will find you rayling.' " 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



309 



And this other: 

" There be many rich men, both Yeoman and Gentry, 
That for their owne private gaine hurt a whole country ; 
By closing free commons, yet they'le make as though 
'Twere for common good, but 1 know what I know." 

A penny an acre was the result of knight's fee system as shown 
by Seebohm very ingeniously, p. 39. Towns paid quitrents as a 
whole in New York State. There is never any separation of a 
town into severalties in any State. The town processions the 
land, pays taxes, etc. Livingston and Smith's Laws of New 
York, vol. ii, 237-249. In the Grants and Ceremonies of New 
Jersey of Leaming and Spicer, 1664, it is provided that the lots 
shall be of certain sizes, "excepting Cities, Towns, and the near 
Lots of Townships. By 1672 towns were becoming common, 
and the regular laying out of Land, Rules for building each Street 
in Townships and Quantities of Ground for each House Lot, the 
same is left to the freeholder or first undertaker thereof." The 
antiquity of the swineherd may be appreciated by the mention of 
him in the Thorold Rogers in the Middle Ages, Work and 
Wages, 83. 

The law that each cultivator was accountable for a portion of 
fence, and must pay the damage done by cattle intruding, was as 
old as the laws of Ine in the seventh century, and probably much 
earlier. This equitable law existed in New England, New York, 
New Jersey, etc., a thousand years after. Compare Seebohm's 
Village Community, 1 10. 

Of primitive town government no better outline is afforded 
than that found in Connecticut Records, i, 30 (1639) • 

" The Townes of Hartford, Windsore, and Wethersfield, or 
any other of the Townes within this jurisdiction, shall each of 
them have power to dispose of their owne lands vndisposed of, 
and all other comodityes arysing out of their owne lymitts bound- 
ed out by the Court, the libertyes of the great River excepted, as 
also to choose their owne officers, and make such orders as may 
be for the well ordering of their owne Townes, being not repug- 
nant to any law here established, as also to impose penaltyes for 
the breach of the same, and to estreat and levy the same, and for 
non-payment to distrayne, and yf there be noe personall estate, 
to sue to the Court to sell his or their house or land, for making 
satisfaction. Also each of the aforesayd Townes shall have power 
by a generall consent once every yeare to choose out 3, 5, or 7 of 



Chap. VI. 



Note 8, 
page 282. 



Note 9, 
page 282. 



Note 10, 
pjage 283. 



3IO 



The Transit of Civilization. 



their cheefe Inhabitants, whereof one to be chosen moderato', 
who having taken an oath prouided in that case, shall have a 
casting voice in case they be equall, w'"' sayd p'sons shall meett 
once in every 2 monthes & being mett together, or the maior part 
of them, whereof the moderato' to be one, they shall have power 
to heare, end and determine all controversies, eyther tresspasses 
or debts not exceeding 40s. provided both partyes live in the same 
Towne ; also any two of them or the moderate' may graunt out 
summons to the party or partyes to come to their meetings to 
answere the actions ; also to administer oath to any witnesses for 
the clearing of the cause, and to give judgment and execution 
against the party offending. But yf eyther party be grieved att 
the sentence, he shall haue hberty to appeale to a higher Court, 
p'vided it be before iudgment and execution be graunted. But yf 
it fall out there be noe ground for the appeale, the Court to con- 
firme the iudgment and give good cost and fine or punish the 
party appealing." 

Of town communities in " Delewer" Bay in 1670 the following 
is from Denton's Brief Description of New York : " These per- 
sons being thus qualified settle the place and take in what inhab- 
itants to themselves they shall see cause to admit of until their 
Town be full ; these associates thus taken in have equal privileges 
with themselves and they make a division of the Land suitable to 
every man's occasions, no man being debarr'd of such quantities 
as he hath occasion for, the rest they let lie in common till they 
have occasion for a new division, never dividing their Pasture- 
land at all which Hes in common to the whole Town." There is 
some ambiguity in Denton's description, and the towns may refer 
themselves to New Jersey and New York. An instance of village 
community of French origin is found in Parkman's Discovery of 
the Great West, p. 7. Here there are town lots with arable land 
outside of the manor and an annual rent to the lord of the manor. 
Parkman's authority is Abb6 Faillon's La Colonic Frangaise in 
Canada. 

In enumerating "The Common Land of the companie," Sir 
Edwin Sandys says, "three thousand in each of the fower old 
Burroughes." Here the borough is made the local unit, as was 
frequently the case in England — a district with common lands. 
The Records of Virginia, p. 15. In New England the town be- 
came the borough for representation ; in Virginia the borough or 
hundred began, but the unit soon drifted into the county with 



Land and Labor in the Early Colonies. 



311 



which the parish was almost always coterminous. Bacon's Laws 
of Maryland, 1694, provide for the laying out of a common for a 
new town. This was the usual course of procedure. Long be- 
fore this time it is probable that manors were given up. Copley 
to Lord Baltimore, April 3, 1638, in Calvert papers, makes a 
strong statement of the difficulty of maintaining them in Mary- 
land. 

Charter to Throckmorton, Yeardley, R. Berkley, and Smythe, 
in Smith of Nibley MSS., 57 : " And shall also within the said 
terme of seaven years grant to the said Adventurers . . . letters 
and grants of incorporacion by some vsuall or fit name or title 
with liberty to them and their successors from tyme to tyme to 
frame and make orders ordinances and constitutions for the rule 
. . . and directynge of all persons to be transported and settled 
vpon the land hereby intended to be granted," etc. This bears 
date February 3, 1618 (1619), and was no doubt the model on 
which many grants were made at that time. It indicated a liberal 
gift of local autonomy hardly to be realized without the granting 
of township government or of government by the borough or 
hundred. The colony of Virginia was to have no jurisdiction 
except in case of " tryals of matters of Justice by appeale or other- 
wise." This was precisely the case with the more independent 
towns in England. Gomme's English Village Communities, 
generally. 

But the uninclosed vacant lots on which speculators planned 
to build, and on which cattle were pastured, took the name of 
commons and held it all the way into the interior. Commons 
they are to-day, but the title and the thing are passing into swift 
forgetfulness. Boston Common remains a part of the original 
common land of the town, and there are some others. 

The same men were reappointed by the Petsoe Vestry in 1699, 
" oversears of the highways " for another year, " they having not 
perform'd the offiss thare unto belonging the year Past." 

Harrison marks this difference in descent in Elizabeth's day : 
" Burrow kind " where the younger is preferred before the others, 
" which is the custome of manie counties of this region " ; also the 
woman to have the third of her husband's possessions. 

Nasse cites the statute of 1488, chaps, xvi and xix as marking 
the beginning of inclosures of commons. The last was " An act 
21 



Chap. VI. 



Note 13, 
page 285. 



Note 14, 
page 290. 



Note 15, 
page 290. 



Note 16, 
page 293. 



Note 17, 
page 294. 



312 



The Transit of Civilization. 



against pulling down of townes." It had no doubt begun some- 
what earlier. In 1513 a law of Henry VIII prescribes that the 
" pulling downe and destruction of townes within this realm, and 
laying to pasture lands which customably have been manured 
and occupyed wyth tythage and husbandry," should be restored. 
So the succeeding acts of 24 and 25 Henry VIII. The reformer 
Becon denounces the " wrong they have done to the poor com- 
mons, as by making common pastures several to themselves," etc. 
Fortress of the Faithful, 598. The character of Latimer's ser- 
mons against the abuse is well known. In 1 549 the peasantry 
rose in an endea\or to restore the commons. Harrison says in 
1577 that some "daily do make beggars inough whereby to pes- 
ter the land espieng a further commoditie in their commons, 
holds, tenures, dooth find such meanes as therby to wipe many 
out of their occupiengs, and turne the same unto his private 
gaines." Holinshed, i, 308. In 1607 riots are noted against 
inclosures of commons and wastes. Nichol's Poor Laws, 232. 
There is a sermon on the Rainbow preached at Paul's Cross in 
1617 by Bourne, in which he graphically says: " Depopulaiors 
have inclosed fields, townes, churches, and all, pulling those down 
which their religious forefathers did build up, stopping doores 
with thornes and their windows with brushes ; yea, covering 
their roofs with thatch ; nay, leaving them naked or else turning 
these holy places into barnes or sheepcoates or other prophane 
uses," p. 47. See also Stafford's A Brief Conceipt of English 
Pollicy, 1632. Harleian Miscell. ix, 199. The extracts that 
might be quoted are all but innumerable, but Marshall in 1786 
shall end these where he says that the spirit of inclosure is such 
that in half a century more an open field or undivided common 
may be rare. It was the cry of oppression at first, when the 
change to sheep farming was made. Selden says Depopulatio 
Agrorum is a great offense in the common law. And yet this 
revolution in agriculture, so unjustly enforced, was beneficial to 
England. The peasants thrown out to beg lived or died accord- 
ing to their shiftiness. The cruel law of natural selection de- 
stroyed those unable to adapt themselves ; human advancement 
is pitiless and unforgiving. 

Chamberlayne's State of England, All the volumes after 17 10 
say of villanage, " But this kind of tenure is in a manner out of 
use." I am aware that this brings serfdom further down than 
the authorities by a hundred and fifty years. The copy I con- 
sulted lacked the volumes between 1702 and 1708, but the change 



Land and Labor ifi the Early Colonies. 



313 



takes place in that interval. Serfdom went out before this time ; 
it had practically been out of use for long generations. 

Servants hired or apprenticed " were subject to be corrected 
by their Master or Mistress, and resistance by a servant is pun- 
ished with some severe penalty," says Chamberlayne. A fatal 
blow from a servant to a master was petty treason, and brought 
on him capital punishment. He had no redress for ill treatment. 
The hired servant as well as the apprentice might be sold for his 
unexpired time. He must work for a price fixed by others, and 
no man would hire him without the permission of his former mas- 
ter. He was a slave for a time in all but name. Any combi- 
nation on the part of the employed looking to a strike was trea- 
sonable. 

Note. — I have reserved the Carolinas and Pennsylvania until 
they can be fully treated. Their history in the seventeenth cen- 
tury is short. 



Chap. VI. 



Note 19, 
page 295. 



INDEX. 



Abbeys, places for the education of 
young people, 256, n. i. 

Abce book, 213 ; 25S, n. 4. 

Aberdeen Burgh Records, 270, n. 23. 

Abridgment of Philosophical Trans- 
actions, Sir R. Murray in, 42, n. 
12 ; Dr. T. Robinson in, 42, n. 12. 

Abstract of Records, 260, n. 9. 

Accomac County, Virginia, Records 
of, 74, m. ; 14S ; 290, m. 

" Accommodation, an," 279 ; 287 ; 
town had refusal of, if sold, 259. 

Account of foundation of Society for 
Propagation of the Gospel, appen- 
dix to the sermon of 1706, 167, m. 

Acosta's Hist. Nat., etc., 65, m. ; 90, 
n. 20 ; 102, m. ; 103, m. ; 131, n. 7 ; 
133, n. 10. 

Acre right, 279. 

Acrelius, 132, n. 8. 

Adam, the sin of, 177 ; criminal ex- 
horted to repent of, 203, n. 25. 

Adams's, H. B., Cape Ann and Salem, 
275. m. 

Adams, John, ignorant of origin of 
commune, 280. 

Addison's, Joseph, essay on witchcraft 
in The Spectator, 46, n. 18. 

Adrian, Pope, amulet worn by, 90, 
n. 20. 

/Egineta, Paulus, Adams's Commen- 
tary on, 51, m. ; extracts from zEtius 
in, 51, m. ; 52, m. ; 57, m. ; 63, m. ; 
64, m. ; 71, m. ; 81, n. 5 ; 85, n. 10 ; 
90, n. 20 ; 94, n. 30. 

Affections, natural, subordinated to 
duty, 193. 

African slavery, 303-305. See also 
Sl.wery, Slavk.s. 

African speech left hardly a trace 
upon dialect, 112. 

Ague, popular cure for, 92, n. 25. 

Alexipharmical mixtures whose vir- 
tues have no rational basis, 90, n. 
20. 



Allen's, James, Election Sermon, 163, 

m. 
Alms-deeds, " liberalitie in, founda- 
tion for reward in eternall life," 
170. 
Altar fires, peril of kindling, with em- 
bers from hell, 29. 
Ambassadors shut into Winthrop's 

house over Sunday, 162. 
American, the, nimble-witted, but less 
patient and profound than the Eng- 
lishman, 127. 
American Antiquarian Society Trans- 
j actions, 8, m. 
American herbs esteemed medicinal, 
67, 68. 
! American Journal of Science, 132, 
j n. 8. 
American Philosophical Transactions, 
story of swallow taken out of slime 
j in February, 44, n. 13. 
I American remedies, 69-72. 
j American witchcraft, pamphlet bib- 
! liography of, 47, n. 20. 

Americanisms borrowed from both 
I ends of England, log, no. 
j Ames's, William, A Sound out of Z ion, 
I 186, m. 

1 Ames's Almanac, 1730, 107, m. 
I Amsterdam Pharmacopoeia, formula 
I in, 86, n. 14. 

^ Amulet, mode of preparing a toad for 
an, 85, n. 10 ; worn by Pope Adrian 
next his heart, 90, n. 20. 
Amulets, superstitious use of, 71 ; cure 
by similitudes found in treatment 
by, 84, n. 7. 
Anabaptists, opinion about angels held 

by, 45, n. 15. 
Andromachus, physician to Nero, 63 ; 
added flesh of viper to universal 
antidote, 63 ; remedy of, lauded by 
Galen, 63. 
Andrews's Old Church Lore, 308, 
n. 3. 



315 



3i6 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Angels, uncountable, turned round 
the crystalline spheres, 17 ; gave 
warnings by dreams, 18 ; classic 
dignity of Milton's evil, 22. 

Anglo-Saxon culture developed in 
America, i. 

Animal life, marvelous stories of, 15. 

Animal remedies in use in early colo- 
nial practice and in Europe, 72 ; 
83, n. 7- 

Animals, American, popular use of, 
69 ; named by descriptive epithets, 
100 ; not easily fitted with English 
titles, 105. 

Antimony, sulphuret of, used by Jews, 
94, n. 30; one of the "seven won- 
ders of the world," 94, n. 30. 

Anti-ritualism, extremes of, 187. 

Antislavery movements, 305, 306. 

Appeal to higher courts, right to, 
hampered and watched in Con- 
necticut, 280. 

Apple-eating on the Sabbath repre- 
hensible, 161. 

Apprenticed servants treated as prop- 
erty, 296. 

Apprentices, free, 295. 

Aramatori the first to question equiv- 
ocal generation of insects, 41, n. 12. 

Arcanum Lullianum, most secret 
mode of compounding the ITniver- 
sal Medicine in the, 88, n. 16. 

Archdale, tolerant Quaker Governor 
of South Carolina, 150. 

Archdale's Carolina, 150, m. 

Argall, character of, 156. 

Aristotelis Secretum Secretorum, 37, 
n. 4. 

Aristotle observed everything, 48 ; 
circulation of the blood contrary to 
authority of, 49. 

Army worm regarded with wonder in 
Massachusetts, 39, n. 9. 

Articles of Visitation. See Cran- 
mer's Articles, etc. 

Asceticism, skimmed-milk, of the early 
schools, 209. 

Ascham, Roger, praised cockfighting, 
181 ; on the barbarity of school- 
masters, 242 ; writes The Schole- 
master, 242. 

Ashton's Humor of the Seventeenth 
Century, 30S, n. 7. 

Assimulate, curing by the, 57. 

Astrology, works on, esteemed, 5 ; 
crossed the wide seas with the emi- 



grants, 6 ; popularity of, 37, n. 6 ; 
opposed by some of the clergy, 37, n. 
6 ; doctrine of correspondence con- 
nects closely with every other sci- 
ence, 37, n. 6. 
Astronomical Description of the Late 
Comet or Blazing Star, by Samuel 
Danforth, 35, n. 3, 
Astronomical errors in orthodox cir- 
cles, 4. 
Astronomy the science that touched 

the popular imagination, 3. 
Astruc's Histoire de la Faculte de 
Medecine de Montpellier, 95, n. 30. 
Atwater's New Haven, 236, m. ; 268, 

n. 24. 
Aubrey, quoted in Prefatory Memoir 

to reprint of Exercitatio, 48, m. 
Aubrey's Miscellanies, 91, n. 21. 
Auroras seen as swords of flame, 9 ; 

awful forerunners, 9. 
Austerities, Puritan, enforced with 

ruthless severity, 161. 
" Awakening, the Great," metamor- 
phosed into philanthropic agitations, 
168. 

Babylonical letter-learned physicians 
to be discountenanced, 79. 

Bacon, Francis, not known to the emi- 
grants, 3 ; flounders in exploring 
coasts of physical science, 10, 11 ; 
superstition of, 23 ; inclined to be- 
lieve in weapon ointment, 60 ; reme- 
dy for colic given by, 84, n. 9 ; scru- 
ples against idolatry shown by. 

Bacon, Nathaniel, the Virginia rebel, 
last illness of, a divine judgment, 
II ; 40, n. II. 

Bacon's Laws of Maryland, 149, m. ; 

239, m. ; 311, n. 12. 

Bacon's Natural Plistory, 11, m. ; 40, 
n. 12 ; 60, m. ; 81, n. 5 ; 85, n. 11. 

Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, people 
warned of, by signs, 8. 

Bailey's Andover, 235, m. ; 237, m. ; 

240, m. ; 261, n. 9 ; 271, n. 29. 
Bannister, the botanist, observed Vir- 
ginia plants, 69. 

Baptism necessary to salvation, 175 ; 
of babes not always to be had in 
New England, 184 ; saving virtue 
a'icribed to, 200, n. 21 ; value at- 
tached to, by the people, 200, n. 21 ; 
" the gate," 203, n. 26. 



I 



Index. 



317 



Barbarism, niedicv;val, of the people, 

180. 
Barbecue in general use in colonies, 

133. n- 13- 

Barber, surgical implements of, 74. 

Barber's Historical Collections of New 
Jersey, 117, m. ; 204, n. 30. 

Barber's New York Collection, 20, m. 

Barclay's Inner Life of the Sects of 
the Commonwealth, 186, m. ; 205, 
n. 32. 

Barkly or Berkeley, sub-colony of, 285. 

Barrough's Method of Phisicke, a 
handbook in New England and 
Virginia, 54 ; 82, n. 6 ; 94, n. 29 ; 
translated into the Indian tongue by 
Eliot, 169. 

Barrow, the Separatist, 205, n. 32. 

Barrowist system prevailed generally 
in New England, 204, n. 31. 

Barton's Medical and Physical Jour- 
nal, 57, m. 

Bartram, John, the Pennsylvania bot- 
anist. Observations, 136, n. 19. 

Bartram, William, on swallows hiber- 
nating, 44, n. 13 ; Travels, 100, m. 

Basilica Chymica, a Paracelsian book, 
54 ; 85, n. 10. 

Bassompierre's Embassy, 87, n. 14. 

Bay Psalm Book used as a reader, 
213. See also New England 
Psalm Book. 

Bayle, Pierce, inspired to write by 
comet of 16S0, 39, n. 8 ; tEuvres de, 
69. 

Bayly's, Bishop, Practice of Piety, es- 
teemed as almost divine authority, 
122 ; translated into Indian tongue 
of Massachusetts, 122 ; much read 
in Virginia, 157 ; plan of salvation 
in, 168, 169 ; reason for marvelous 
popularity of, 171 ; ethereal verbal- 
ism in, 199, n. ig. 

Bean, kidney, good to strengthen the 
kidneys, 70 ; called Turkish bean, 
103 ; 132, n. 8. 

Bear baiting, the favorite Sunday 
amusement, 181 ; not imported to 
America, 181. 

Beavers eaten on fish days, 15. 

Beccaria's Dei Delitti e delle Pene, 
1 99, n. 17. 

Becon's Fortress of the Faithful, 312, 
n. i3. 

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of Eng- 
land, 208, m. ; 255, n. I. 



Bees produced by kine in decomposi- 
tion, 10;^ 39, n. 10. 

Beguin's Elemens de Chymie, 90, n. 
20. 

Behmen's, Jacob, De Signatura Re- 
rum, 84, n. 8. 

Belknap's New Hampshire, 293, m. 

Benevolence of New England more 
effective than that of the South, 288. 

Berkeley, Sir William, absolute in 
Virginia, 249. 

Beschreibung und Contrefacture der 
Vornehmster Statt der Welte, 181, 
m. 

Beverley's History of Virginia, 133, n. 
10 ; 134, n. 13 ; 223, m. 

Bezoar stone, a universal antidote, 
64 ; mythical notion of origin, 65 ; 
used as a remedy in the colonies, 66 ; 
called by Castrillo " Regna de las 
V^nenos," go, n. 20. 

Bezoardick powder, ingredients of, 
87, n. 14. 

Bezoart, seven kinds of, 90, n. 20. 

Bible, enlarging influence of author- 
ized translation of, g8 ; excluded 
from the service, 188, 189. 

Birds, migration of, 11, 12 ; proved 
to grow on trees, 12 ; hiding places 
of migratory, 13. 

Bishop escorted by one hundred and 
fifty horsemen, 17. 

Bison named buffalo, 100. 

Black powder, Stafford's, a cure for 
smallpox and eruptive diseases, 57 ; 
method of preparation, 58 ; 85, n. 10. 

Blacks, enslavement of, not repug- 
nant to the colonists. 303. 

Blackstone on witchcraft in his Com- 
mentaries, 46, n. 18. 

Blair, James, efforts of, for William 
and Mary College, 252 ; reply of 
Seymour to, 252 ; held his place as 
bishop's commissary for half a cen- 
tury, 253 ; fifty years' service brought 
no honors to, 254 ; students fired 
blank cartridges at, 270, n. 28 ; in- 
structions to, from General Assem- 
bly, 272, n. 31. 

Bland's, E., Newe Brittaine, 103, m. 

Blanket, a colored, called a match- 
core, 106. 

Blasphemy suppressed by laws and 
military orders, 147 ; punishment 
for, derived from mediaeval codes, 
196, n. 7. 



3i8 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Bleeding used by barbers and other 

humble practitioners, 53. 
Blight of 1665 attributed to execution 

of Quaker martyrs, 150. 
Blood, circulation of the, theses on, in 

1660 and 1699, 248. 
Blue Book for 1867, 268, n. 23. 
Boileau, in Arret Burlesque, ridicules 

belief in comets being ominous, 38, 

n. 8 ; concerning circulation of the 

blood, 49. 
Bolton's General Directions, 204, n. 

29. 
Bonesetters, the, of early New Eng- 
land, 75. 
Book learning, lack of, compensated 

for, 10, II. 
Book of Quinte Essence in E. E. 

Text Soc, 57, m. 
Books read in the colonies, 121 ; sent 

to Virginia in 1619, 122 ; old, of 

seventeenth century libraries, 127, 

128 ; the first, 212. 
Bossu's Nouveaux Voyages, 134, n. 

13- 

Boston, first witch trial at, in 1648, 
20 ; magistrate's wife at, hanged 
for a witch, 20. 

Boston Common a part of the original 
common land of the town, 311, n. 
14. 

Boston peninsula, gates of, closed on 
Sunday, 163. 

Boston Town Records, 226, m. ; 237, 
m. 

Botany the foremost biological sci- 
ence, 68. 

Boucher's Causes, 264, n. 16. 

Bownd's famous treatise on the Sab- 
bath, 157 ; 160; 163. 

Boyle's, Robert, Sceptical Chemist, 
89, n. 18. 

Bozman's Maryland, 152, m. ; 238, m. 

Bradford's Plymouth, 150, m. 

Bradstreet, Anne, beginner of New 
England poetry, on relation between 
elements and humors of body, 50 ; 
sings of the number four, 81, n. 3 ; 
wrote verses in imitation of Du 
Bartas, 123, 124 ; may have seen 
Hamlet in England, 139, n. 23 ; "a 
right Du Bartas girle," 139, n. 24 ; 
example of an educated woman in 
New England, 271, n. 29. 

Braithwayt's Drunken Barnaby, 136, 
n. 19 ; 169, m. 



Bray's General View of the Colonies, 
prefixed to sermon of 1697, 263, n. 

Brayleyand Britton's History of Hert- 
fordshire, 129, n. 2. 

Breakfast, no, for schoolboys, 239 ; a 
meal not generally reckoned with, 
240 ; none in Henry VIII's time, 
259, n. 5. 

Brewster, Elder, had been a printer 
in Holland, 120. 

Brickell's Carolina, 70, m. ; 72, m. 

Brigham's Lowell Institute Lectures, 
262, n. 12. 

Brinsley on school punishments, 243. 

Brinsley's, John, Consolations for our 
Grammar Schooles, 219, m. ; 220, 
m. ; 243, m. ; 264, n. 17 ; 269, n. 27, 
n. 28 ; 270, n. 28. 

Brinsley's, John, Ludus Literarius, 
214, m. ; 215, m. ; 216, m. ; 217, 
m. ; 240, m. ; 243, m. ; 258, n. 3 ; 
259, n. 7 ; 259, n. 8 ; 269, n. 27. 

Brinsley, John, works of, most in- 
structive to student of the history of 
education, 269, n. 27. 

Bristol, England, chief center of co- 
lonial trade, 301. 

Bristol, R. I., established a school in 
1682, 239. 

British Pharmacopoeia, universal anti- 
dote expelled from the, 63. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, superstition of, 

23- 

Browne's, Sir Thomas, Vulgar Errors, 
4, m. ; 15, m. ; 16, m. ; 41, n. 12 ; 
46, n. 19 ; 53, m. 

Brown's Travels, in Harris's Voyages, 
15, m. 

Buccaneers confessed their sins when- 
ever a rich prize hove in sight, 149. 

Buchanan, George, called " the prince 
of poets of our time," 139, n. 23. 

Buckra, a name for the white man, 
112. 

Buckwheat, Asiatic origin of, 102 ; 
called Saracen corn, 102. 

Bull baiting forbidden by the colony 
of East Jersey, 204, n. 30. 

BuUein's Dialogue against the Fever 
Pestilence, 93, n. 26. 

Bullock's Virginia, 100, m. 

Bunyan's conscience awakened by the 
" Practice of Piety," 169. 

Burning to death in Boston and Cam- 
bridge, 182. 



Index. 



319 



Burroughs, George, the minister, 
hanged for his strength, 33. 

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 13, 
m. ; 44, n. 13 ; 60, m. ; 8q, n. iS. 

Bury Wills (Camden Society), 42, n. 
12 ; 136, n. 19 ; 262, n. 12. 

Burying in gardens and orchards, 183. 

Bustard, Turkey, 130, n. 6. 

Butler's Feminine Monarchic, 39, n. 
10. 

Byrd, William, of Westover, MSS. of, 
140, n. 25 ; the first man sent to 
England for education, 224. 

Byrd's Dividing Line, 175, m. 

Calamity, every, provoked by a par- 
ticular sin, 150. 

Cal. Col. Papers, State Paper Office, 
162, m. ; 183, m. 

Calvert papers, 311, n. 12. 

Camden's Brittania, 261, n. 11. 

Cambridge Platform of 1648, 205, n. 

31- 

Campanius's New Sweden, loi, m. ; 
103, m. 

Campbell's, Charles, History of Vir- 
ginia, 251, m. 

Campbell's, Lord, Lives of the Chan- 
cellors, 140, n. 25. 

Canones Regiminis Ecclesiastici, 206, 
n. 34 ; 206, n. 35. 

Captives outlawed by "infidelity" en- 
slaved, 303. 

Cards, men and women staked at, 296. 

Carew's, Richard, Survey of Cornwall, 
13, m. ; 43, n. 13. 

Carter, Colonel John, will of, 264, n. 
16. 

Cartwright, the Puritan leader of 
Elizabeth's time, maxim of, 147 ; 
tied Puritanism to temporal laws 
of Jews, 182 ; opposed to pagan 
names for children, 190. 

Casaubon's Enthusiasme, 1656, 21, m. 

Castiglione, the Italian botanist, 69. 

Castiglione's Viaggio negli Stati 
Uniti, 13T, n. 7 ; 132, n. g ; 133, 
n. 10 ; 194, n. i. 

Castrillo, a Jesuit, on astrology', 38, 
n. 6. 

Castrillo's Magia Natural, o Ciencia de 
Filosofia Secreta, 38, n. 6 ; 65, m. ; 
83, n. 7 ; 90, n. 20 ; 91, n. 21. 

Cat, the black, 26. 

Catechism, Assembly's, 195, n. 2. 

Catechism, Calvin's, 195, n. 2. 



Catechism, Cranmer's, of 1548, 174 ; 

198, n. 14 ; 198, n. 15 ; 200, n. 21. 
Catechism of John Robinson, 205, n. 

32. 
Catechism of Thomas Becon, 198, n. 

II ; 200, n. 21. 
Catechism, the, the corner stone of 

the country school in Holland, 267, 

n. 21. 
Catechisms, writing of, regarded as a 

sort of heavenly vocation, 178. 
Caterpillars, necklace of, to cure 

ague, 71. 
Cathartics of seventeenth century, 81, 

n. 5. 
Cathedral, scholars sustained in each, 

257, n. 2. 
Cathedral Commission, First Report, 

256, n. I ; 257, n. 2, 
Cattle might not be pastured in the 

common field on the Sabbath, 161 ; 

prayers of, at midnight on Christ- 
mas, 117. 
Caulkin's History of New London, 

213, m. ; 271, n. 29. 
Caxton's Prologue to the Eneydos, 

130, n. 3. 
Census, aversion to, 191 ; attempt to 

secure a, in New York defeated, 

192. 
Century Magazine, April and October, 

1894, 137, n. 19. 
Chalmer's Dictionary of Biography, 

90, n. 18. 
Chamberlayne's State of England, 

295, m. ; 312, n. 18 ; 313, n. ig. 
Chamberlen, Dr. Peter, attempted to 

organize women practitioners of 

midwifer\', 77. 
Characteristics, English, lost, 127 ; 

national, a result of controlling tra- 
ditions, I. 
Chauncey's Cambridge, Mass., Al- 
manac, 1663, 7, m. 
Chauncey, President, Commencement 

Sermon of, 163, m. ; 265, n. ig 
Chevy Chase chanted to yoting people 

in the American woods, iig. 
Chief, generic English use of, gg. 
Child's Scottish and English Ballads, 

iiq, m. ; 138, n. 20. 
Children, harsh penalties against dis- 
obedient, 142 ; not suffered to play 
on the Lord's Day, 161 ; of hea- 
then parents damned for want of 
baptism, 174 ; pious and significant 



320 



The Transit of Civilization. 



names for, 190 ; exclusion of, froin 
baptism, 291, n. 21 ; of the faithful 
included with their parents, 202, n. 
23 ; increase of number of, 229 ; 
shipped by the score as apprentices, 

295- 

Chimes, ringing of, on Sunday as 
great an offense as parricide, 199, 
n. 19. 

Chinese medical theory of like cures 
like, 82, n. 7. 

Chinkapin, derivation of, 107. 

Chirurgeons, name given to rough 
practitioners, 74. 

Christ, denial of the divinity of, a capi- 
tal offense under Catholic law in 
Maryland, 149. 

Christ Church parish, Middlesex 
County, Virginia, manuscript rec- 
ords of, 262, n. 13. 

Christ's Hospital, founded in 1553, 
257. n. 3- 

Christian! on comets and other phe- 
nomena, 38, n. 8. 

Christmas observance iniquitous, 154. 

Church, the first, in Massachusetts, 
organized to pacify the Lord's 
wrath, 150. 

Church attendance, difficulties of, in 
the Chesapeake region, 158. 

Church constitution, earliest New Eng- 
land, 205, n. 32. 

Church going required by Argall, 156. 

Church government, eccentricities of, 
185. 

Church music, people opposed to, 188. 

Church officers, definition of, 205, n. 

Church organ refused by Brattle Street 
Church, 189. 

Churches, parish, had their schools, 
257, n. I. 

Churchmen, Puritan and non-Puritan, 
cherished by church in Virginia, 
184. 

Cinchona tree, medicinal value of 
bark of, 68 ; most important of all 
modern remedies, 79. 

Cinderella known as Rose, Pink, and 
Piney in New England, 120. 

Circulation, la, et ses Detracteurs, in 
Revue Scientifique, 49, m. 

Circulation of the blood first expound- 
ed, 48 ; French king petitioned to 
prohibit teaching of, 49 ; argued in 
master's thesis at Harvard 50 ; still 



a question at Harvard in 1699, 50 ; 
ignorance of, in Prance, 53. 

Ciuile and Vnciuile Life, Roxburghe 
edition, 218, m. ; 264, n. 15. 

Clap's, Roger, Memoir, 144, m. ; 166. 

Class distinctions sharply marked, 194, 
n. I. 

Classification of vertebrates, unscien- 
tific. 14, 15. 

Claypole's Manuscript Letters, 106, m. 

Clayton, John, botanist, observations 
of the foundation for the Flora Vir- 
ginica, 92, n. 24 ; 133, n. 12. 

Clayton, John, Virginia parson, tells 
of use of bezoar stone as medicine, 
66 ; observes Virginia plants, 69 ; 
collected 300 plants used as reme- 
dies by the Indians, 73 ; unflatter- 
ing account of Virginia physicians 
given by, 75, 76 ; author of papers 
in Transactions of Royal Society, 
92, n. 24 ; to Royal Society, 93, n. 
27 ; 103, m. ; 106, m. ; 130, n. 6 ; 
133, n. 10. 

Clayton, Rev. John, in Force's Tracts, 
54, m. ; 76, m. 

Clayton, Rev. John, in Miscell. Curi- 
osa, ICO, m. 

Clayton, Rev. John, in Philosophical 
Transactions, 133, n. 10. 

Clergy, mistaken zeal of, in witchcraft 
delusion, 28 ; the new based their 
piety on the supernatural, 30 ; had 
a fair acquaintance with medical 
knowledge, 76 ; wore no surplices, 
84. 

Clergymen, second generation of, in 
Virginia, 158 ; few in North Caro- 
lina in eighteenth centuiT, 175 ; 
severity of, due to an ideal of con- 
duct, 180. 
Clothing, soft, not for humble people, 

144. 
Coaches rare enough in America to be 

noticeable, 250, 251. 
Cockfighting a Christian amusement 
in Virginia and Maryland, 182 ; 
opinions against, 204, n. 29 ; forbid- 
den in East Jersey, 204, n. 30. 
Code of Massachusetts, 145, m. 
Coke, astute jurist, superstition of, 23. 
College at Henrico for Indian chil- 
dren, 220 ; 226. 
College ideals, 246 ; curriculum of 
Milton's time " an asinine feast of 
sow thistles and brambles," 247. 



Index. 



321 



College of William and Mary, 222 ; 
239 ; holidays allowed at, 241 ; 
founding of, 250 ; richest institution 
of learning in America, 251 ; gram- 
mar school of, 260, n. 9 ; charter of, 
272, n. 31. 

Collegiate School at Charles City, 
220 ; Virginia Company added to 
endowment of, 221. 

Collier's Ecclesiastical History, Lath- 
bury 's edition, 20S, m. ; 256, n. i ; 
257, n. 3. 

Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, 
203, n. 26. 

Colonies, existence of, depended on 
supply of slaves, 303, 304. 

Columna's, Fabius, Phytobasanos, 42, 
n. 12. 

Comet heralded blight of 1665, 7 ; 
of 16S0, a call from heaven to In- 
crease Mather, 8 ; alarmed Dutch 
on upper Hudson, 8 ; made Eng- 
lish colonists talk about reforming 
their morals, 39, n. 8 ; awakened 
discussion in Mexico, 39, n. 8. 

Comets and other portents, dread of, 
6 ; prognostication by, 6 ; beliefs 
concerning, 7. 

Comets, works on ominous character 
of, a considerable element in Euro- 
pean literature, 38, n. 8. 

Common fields, three, in primitive 
towns, 279 ; 282 ; animated scene 
in the, 279 ; 308, n. 6 ; in closure 
of, thi-eatened, 280 ; 308, n. 7. 

Commons, who should have the ? 277. 

" Commons " granted to a " hundred," 
285. 

Communal plan adopted from New 
England to Delaware, 281. 

Commune, the town, very primitive, 
277; what was this village? 278 ; 
in England in seventeenth century, 
279 ; in America, 280 ; 2S6 ; 309, n. 
10 ; Plymouth and Salem organized 
on the plan of the, 281 ; in Long Is- 
land and New Jersey, 285 ; circum- 
stances unfavorable to, 286. 

Complete Discovery of the State of 
Carolina, 132, n. 8. 

Complete Report of Royal Catholic 
Commission, 207, m. 

Condemning men that they might be 
sold, 301. 

Confectio Alcarmas, an Arabic remedy, 
ingredients of, 86, n. 14 ; 87, n. 14. 



Conjurations, minor, 117. 

Connecticut Records, 142, m. ; 147, 
m. ; 148, m. ; 151, m. ; 154, m. ; 195, 
n. 4 ; 282, m. ; 289, m. ; 309, n. 10. 

Connecticut school of law of 1650, 
228. 

Connecticut Valley Historical Society 
Collections, 188, m. 

Conscience, supremacy of the, 192- 
194 ; exercised on frivolous judg- 
ments, 193. 

Conspiracy of indentured servants in 
Virginia, 298. 

Contraries cured by contraries, 57. 

Convent schools and nunneries, young 
women sent to, 209. 

Conveyance, instruments of, 273 ; 307, 
n. I. 

Convict servants, 300-302. 

Copernicanism made headway slowly, 
3 ; stirred our modern wits, 4 ; pre- 
ferred by early Harvard mathema- 
ticians, 4 ; Bishop Godwin declared 
his belief in doctrine of, 35, n. i ; a 
stone rejected of the builders, 36, 
n. 3- 

Corn, use of generic word, 103. 

Corn cob called " huss," 105. 

Corn husks, names for, 104. 

Cornishmen opposed the Reformation, 
96 ; would not have Bible printed in 
English, 96. 

Cotton's, An, account of Bacon's rebel- 
lion in Virginia, 115 ; example of a 
cultivated woman in Virginia, 271, 
n. 2g. 

Cotton, John, comet at death of, 7 ; 
said Sunday began at sunset on 
Saturday, 160. 

Cotton's letter to Lord Say and Seal 
in Hutchinson's Massachusetts, 
195-196, n. 5. 

Cotton's, John, Abstract of Laws, 141, 
m. ; 145, m. ; 147, m. ; 195, n. 4. 

, Grounds and Ends of the Bap- 

tisme of the Children, 197, n. 9 ; 
202, n. 23. 

, Holiness of Church Members, 

172, m. 

, Phenomena quxdam Apocalyp- 

tica. Dedicatory Letter, 204, n. 23. 

, Singing of Psalms a Gospel Or- 
dinance, 186, m. 

, Way of the Churches Cleared, 

19, m. ; 201, n. 21 ; 205, n. 31. 

Court and Country, The, 213, m. 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Court packed by Archbishop Abbot, 
166. 

Cows bequeathed to churches and 
schools, 262, n. 13. 

Cox's, Marian Roalfe, Cinderella, 138, 
n. 20. 

Cranmer's Articles of Visitation, 20, 
m. 

Cranmer's Reformatio Legum cited 
in First Cathedral Report, 257, n. 2. 

Creatures, American, got second-hand 
names from real or supposed re- 
semblances, 100. 

Creatures, half-human, 15. 

Criminal of quality beheaded not 
hanged in Maryland, 144. 

Crimp, the. and his doings, 295, 2g6. 

Crisscross (or Christ's cross) row, 212. 

Crocus metallorum, a universal cure- 
all, 76 ; favorite Virginia remedy, 
94, n. 30 ; composition of, 94, n. 30. 

Cross of St. George obliterated from 
the colors of the trainbands, 151. 

Crouche, Ralphe, Jesuit schoolmaster 
in Maryland, 238. 

Culpepper's Commentary on the Lon- 
don Dispensatory, 93, n. 27. 

Culpepper's Physitian's Library, 87, 
n. 14. 

Culture, human, Puritanism made one 
great contribution to, 192. 

Cunila Americana, name dittany set- 
tled on, 67. 

Customs, old English, revived, 265, 
n. 18. 

Dade's Almanac for 16S4, 41, n. 12. 

Dafter for daughter, 134, n. 14. 

Damnation of non-elect infants, 175, 
176. 

Danforth, Samuel, amends his classics, 
ig6, n. 6. 

Danforth's, Samuel, Astronomical De- 
scription of the Late Comet, 35, n. 
3 ; 38. n. 7. 

Danker's Journal, L. L Hist. Soc, 
151, m. ; 215, m. ; 235, m. ; 298, 
m. 

Dante believed in migration of swal- 
lows, 44, n. 13. 

Deane's, J. W., Sketch of Wiggles- 
worth, 54, m. 

Declaration of the Colonie of Vir- 
ginia, 220-221, m. 

Dedham Historical Register, 244, m. 

Dedham Records, 261, n. 9. 



Deed, whole vocabularies of convey- 
ance in one, 273. 

Deerskin called match-core in Algon- 
km dialects, 106. 

Degrees, tests for, at Harvard, 248. 

Democracy, " God did not oideyne as 
a fitt government," 195-196, n. 5. 

Demoniacal possession, belief in, un- 
avoidable, 27. 

Demons, house-haunting, 25 ; New 
England, visible, 26 ; cast in molds 
supplied by ancient tradition, 26. 

Denifle's, Heinrich, Die Universitaten 
des Mittelalters bis 1400, 272, n. 31. 

Denton's Brief Description of New 
York, 310, n. 11. 

Devil, a whistling, 26. 

Devils, materialistic conception of, in 
chains, 24, 25 ; sometimes visible, 
26. 

De Vries's Korte Plistorael, 132, n. 8. 

De Vries and Donne's, Geo., MS., 
Bodleian Library, 286, m. 

D'Ewe's Autobiography, 8, m. ; 78, 
m. ; 206, n. 36 ; 217, m. ; 218, m. ; 
241, m. ; 243, m. ; 271, n. 30; 272, 
n. 30. 

De Witt's Historical Sketch of the 
Parochial School System of Holland 
preceding Dunshee's History of the 
Dutch Church School in New York, 
267, n. 21. 

Dexter's Congregationalism, 205, n. 

31- 
Diabolism, waning belief in, 171. 
Digby, Sir Kenelm, made himself 

protagonist of sympathetic powder, 

59; moral theism of, 195, n. 2. 
Digby's, Sir Kenelm, Discourse on 

Sympathetic Powder, 86, n. 12. 
, Peripateticall Institutions, 17, 

m. ; 41, n. 12. 
Disease, critical days in, 80, n. 3. 
Disputation, the means of becoming 

expert in Latin, 215 ; rage for, in 

the schools, 260, n. 8. 
District school, modern, development 

of the, 237. 
Disturbances, diabolical, occurred 

early in all the colonies, 19. 
Dittany, same in name as ancient 

remedy Venus used in the .^Eneid, 

66 ; Cretan and white, potent to cure 
poison, 66 ; to remove foreign bodies, 

67 ; to assist in parturition, 67 ; vir- 
tues of, attached to pennyroyal, 67 ; 



Index. 



works on, too numerous for citation, 

gi, n. 22. 
Diuretics of the seventeenth century, 

8i, n. 5. 
Divine right of high birth and official 

position, 141. 
Dock, Christopher, the Pennsylvania 

Dutch teacher, 240. 
Doctrines, harsli, forged into formal 

creeds, 178. 
Documentary History of New York, 

iii, 8, m. ; i, 108, m. 
Documents relating to New York, 

192, m. 
Donne's MS., 296, m. 
Dorchester Records, 108, m. ; 226, m. 
Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare, 

23, m. ; 43, n. 12 ; 118, m. 
Drogheda, the pitiless slaughter of, 

179. 
Drunken people rare, 164. 
Dryness favorable to understanding, 

81, n. 4. 
Du Bartas, Anne Bradstreet wrote 

clever verses in imitation of, 123, 

124. 
Ducking stool and pillory, 280. 
Dufresnoy's Recueil de Dissertations 

sur les Apparitions, 45, n. 15. 
Duke of York's Laws, 149, m. 
Durell's, John. View of the Govern- 
ment and Public Worship in the 

Reformed Churches, 206, n. 33. 
Dutch alarmed by the comet of 1680, 8. 
Dutch Drawne to the Life, 205, n. 32. 
Dutch Manuscripts, Calendar of, 77, 

m. ; 165, m. 
Duties, primary, to those above you. 

Dying, directions for, 170. 

Early English Text Society, No. 32 : 
Boke of Nurture, 15, m. ; 41, n. 12 ; 
Vaughan's Fifteen Directions for 
Health in, 82, n. 5. 

Earth, the, the center of universal 
motion for orthodox circles and co- 
lonial preachers, 4. 

" East India School " at Charles City, 
Va., 220 ; 260, n. 9. 

Ecclesiastical impropriety a heinous 
sin, 184. 

Ecclesiastics more ruthless than lay- 
men, 180. 

Eclipses and other unusual phenomena 
beheld with awe, 9. 



Eden, Governor, and Blackbeard the 
pirate, 175. 

Education generally neglected, 29 ; 
continuity of, 207 ; its beginning in 
the early Christian centuries, 207 ; 
tradition and habit of, 209 ; cow- 
and-calf endowment of, 226 ; reli- 
gious motive for, 227, 22S ; popular, 
rough and scant, 231 ; legal obliga- 
tion to provide, imposed, 232 ; of 
the few transformed into popular, 
237 ; public, dominated by religion, 

237- ... 

Education, higher, in three colonies 
only, 254 ; 261, n. 10. 

Education, university and secondary, 
first aim of, to raise up ministers, 
225. 

Education, voluntary, among the Vir- 
ginians, 263, n. 14. 

Educational decline, alarm at the, 
229 ; inevitable and universal, 233. 

Edwards's, John, Cometomania, 7, m. 

Effingham's instructions, 263, n. 14. 

Egbert, account of austerities of, 255, 
n. I. 

Egerton Papers, Abbot's Letters in, 
166, m. 

Eggleston's, Edward, The Beginners 
of a Nation, 155, m. ; 157, m.; 198, 
n. 14. 

Ehralter Ritterkrieg, 88, n. 16. 

Elder, a ruling, in the hierarchy, 1S5. 

Elements of human body, 50. 

Eliot, John, the Indian apostle, 120; 
translated Method of Phisicke into 
the Indian tongue, 169; had a par- 
ish in Roxbury, 226 ; efforts of, to 
convert slaves, 305. 

Elliot, Rev. Jared, leading colonial 
writer on agriculture, 5, 6 ; respect 
of, for the zodiac, 6. 

Ellis's Roxbury Town, 227, m. 

Elizabeth, Queen, remedies used in 
time of, 93, n. 25, n. 26 ; reminded 
of the decay of learning, 210 ; read- 
ing Demosthenes with Roger As- 
cham, 242. 

Emigrants not intellectual contempo- 
raries of Milton and Shakespeare, 
2 ; between 1620 and 1650, bonds- 
men, 2g6. 

Emotions, strong, enfeebled become 
the wisdom of the age, 199, n. 17. 

Endowment, tenant and servant, for 
schools in Virginia, 221 ; 227. 



3^4 



TJie Tra7isit of Civilization. 



England before the Revolution of 
1688 the mother country of the 
United States, i. 

English-Americans in the first half of 
the seventeenth century, i. m. 

English harvest, season for reaping 
English grains so called, 103. 

English language an insular speech, 
g6 ; cleft into dialects, 97 ; never 
more effective than in hands of mas- 
ters of the Elizabethan time, 97, 98 ; 
sudden demand upon, 98 ; a misfit 
in wilderness of America, 99 ; ad- 
justed itself to new environment, 
99 ; cherished prejudices against 
foreign words, 107 ; all changes of 
usage accounted corruptions, 130, 
n. 4 ; left behind in the grammar 
schools, 215 ; 217 ; not taught in 
the schools until the fourteenth 
century, 257, n. i. 

English studies drive out Latin from 
the free school, 236 ; intruders in a 
Latin school, 261, n. 9. 

Ensign, the English, regarded as a 
gross idol, 151. 

Entail in the aristocratic colonies, 
291 ; swept away by the Revolu- 
tion, 293. 

Ent's Letter in Willis's Translation 
of Harvey's Works, 41, n. 12. 

Erysipelas cured by fowl freshly cut 
open, 87, n. 14. 

Ethics, theocratic, 145. 

Evelyn's Diary, 9, m. ; 88, n. 15 ; 91, 
n. 21 ; 130, n. 3 ; 130, n. 4. 

Events, American, gave birth to Amer- 
ican rhymes, 120. 

Exorcism, Spanish kings had gift of, 
91, n. 21. 

Faillon's, Abbe, La Colonic Fran9aise 
in Canada, 310, n. 11. 

Fairfax Seminary, parish records of 
seventeenth century in original MS. 
in, 234, m. ; 290, m. 

" Fall " for autumn now mainly Amer- 
ican, 136, n. 19. 

Fanatics flourished in the colonies, 79. 

Farmer, the, could have no rights in 
common fields, 287. 

Farms, granting of, discontinued, 2S4 ; 
a mode of landholding, 286 ; inde- 
pendent, driven to the wall, 287. 

Feline twang in London, no. 

Felon, a high-born, favored, 144. 



Fence, a portion of the, assigned to 
each cultivator, 282 ; 309, n. 9. 

Ferule passes from seller to buyer of 
land in England, 276. 

Fetichism, numeral, may be traced to 
Galen, 80, n. 3. 

Fever, pestilential, due to persecution 
of dissenters, 150. 

Field meetings, 279. 

Finespun propositions regarding the 
nature of God, 170. 

Fitzstephen, 256, n. i ; 260, n. 8. 

Fleming, Sir D., Account Book of, 
8, m. 

Flies, strange swarms of, 9. 

Flogging, an age of, 297. 

Folet's Moliere et la Medecin, 40, n. 
10 ; 48, m. ; 49, m. ; 52, m. 

Folk-literature the higher forms of 
folk-lore, 118. 

Folk-superstitions, 117, 118. 

Folk-wisdom, bits of, transported to 
American shores, 118. 

Fonssagrives's Dictionnaire Encyclo- 
pedique des Sciences Medicales, 
88, n. 16, 

Food must not be prepared on the 
Sabbath, 161. 

Foote's Virginia, 263, n. 14. 

Force's, T. M., The Beginning, Prog- 
ress, and Conclusion of Bacon's Re- 
bellion, 8-g, m. ; 201, n. 21. 

Forehead, blood to be drawn from 
middle vein of the, 82, n. 6. 

Forsyth's Antiquary's Portfolio, 76, 
m. ; 95, n. 30 ; 131, n. 6. 

Forward, Rev. Justus, manuscript 
diary of, 132, n. 9 ; 261, n. 10 ; 269, 
n. 26. 

Franklin's, Benjamin, Poor Richard's 
Almanac, no. 

Freedom, privileges of, sold, 294. 

Friday a marked day in regard to 
weather, 116. 

Friends of Germantown, antislaver}' 
protest of, 305. 

Frontier life dangerous to morals and 
manners, 264, n. 18. 

Frontiersmen find little time for learn- 
ing, 233 ; knew no more of litera- 
ture than did the Greek heroes, 

234- 
Fuller, the church historian, proverb 

used by, 114. 
Fuller's Good Thoughts for Bad 

Times, 203, n. 25. 



Index 



325 



Fuller's Worthies, 261, n. 11. 
Furmity, an English word first ap- 
plied to corn, 107. 

Galen not revered, 50 ; bloodletting 
in persons under fourteen or over 
seventy forbidden by, 52 ; remedies 
in Virginia dating back to, 54 ; be- 
lief of, in virtues of theriac and 
mithridate, 63. 

Galenic age, fossil words of the, 51. 

Galenism, simples but remains of, 51. 

Galenist belief of Virginia doctors, 
94. n. 30. 

Galenists in England suspected of 
using spagyric methods, 54 ; nu- 
meral fetichism traced to, 80, n. 3 ; 
strict, never sanctioned cures by 
sympathetic powders, S6, n. 12. 

Galen's Art of Physic in medical li- 
braries, 54. 

Galen's De Antidotis Epitomes, 63, m. 

Galen's De Dynamdiis, 82, n. 7. 

Galen's De Theriaca ad Pisonem, 
63, m. 

Galileo imprisoned, 4 ; Bishop God- 
win's belief in doctrine of, 35, n. i. 

Gaming, objections urged against, 

154- 

Gardiner, John Lyon, recorded differ- 
ence in speech between two Long 
Island communities, 108. 

Gascoin's powder of calcined crabs' 
claws, 94, n. 30. 

Gatford's Public Good without Private 
Interest, 20, m. ; 153. m. ; 184, m. 

Geber quoted in De Via Universali, 
62, m. 

Geddes's History of the Administra- 
tion of John De Witt, 267, n. 21. 

Generation, spontaneous, g, 10 ; 41- 
42, n. 12. 

Gentleman Instructed, The, 40, n. 11. 

Gentleman's Magazine, Library of 
Popular Superstitions, 71, m. ; of 
1830, 171, m. ; of 1828, 270, n. 28. 

Gerarde on dittany, 67. 

Gerarde's History of Plants, 42, n. 12. 

Gerhard's, Johann, Panacea Hermeti- 
cse seu Medicine Universalis, 88, n. 
16. 

Gilbert's, Sir Humphrey, Queen Eliza- 
beth's Achademy, 94, n. 29. 

Girls not admitted to town schools, 
244 ; candidates for wifehood at 
fourteen, 245. 



Glanvill, chaplain in ordinary to 
Charles II, 28 ; calls Addison and 
Montesquieu nullibists, 46, n. 18. 

Glanvill's Sadducisismus Triumpha- 
tus, 28, m. 

Glauber's Chemistry, in medical libra- 
ries, 54 ; De Auri Tinctura sive 
Auro Potabili, 61, m. ; 88, n. 15, 
n. 16 ; 89, n. 18. 

Glover in Philosophical Transactions, 
Abridgment, 67, m. ; 70, m. ; to 
Royal Society, 68, m. 

God of that age worse than the wor- 
shipers, 173. 

Godwin, Bishop, new theory of hiber- 
nation in the satellites, 13; his Voy- 
age to the Moon, 1638, 14, m. ; sug- 
gests doctrine of gravity and declares 
himself on the side of Copernicus and 
Galileo, 35, n. i. 

Godwyn's, Morgan, Negro's and In- 
dian's Advocate, 184, m. 

Gold, potable, a most valuable reme- 
dy, 60 ; universal remedy for human 
maladies, 61 ; administered in solid 
state, 61 ; triplex nature of, 62 ; 
the tincture of the sun, 87, n. 15 ; 
allied with mercury, 88, n. 16 ; 
statute forbidding the making of, 
repealed, 89, n. 18. 

Gomme's English Village Communi- 
ties, 280, m. ; 311, n. 13. 

Goose, barnacle, develop from the 
shellfish barnacle, 12 ; 42, n. 12 ; 
served as fish on Fridays, 12. 

Gortonists should be hanged for con- 
structive blasphemy, 180. 

Gospel Musick, or the Singing of 
David's Psalms, 186, m. 

Gowan's Wooley, 67, m. 

Grace for meals, 258, n. 4. 

Grammar schools. See Schools, 
Free Grammar. 

Grant's, Mrs., Memoirs of an Ameri- 
can Lady, 271, n. 29. 

Grave, sick servant required to dig 
his own, 298. 

Green, Dr. S. A., private letter from, 
108, m. ; in Massachusetts His- 
torical Society Proceedings, 125, 
m. 

Green's Medicine in Massachusetts, 
53, m. ; 62, m. ; 72, m. ; 78, m. ; 
79, m. ; gi, n. 21. 

Green's, Dr. S. A., Groton in Witch- 
craft Times, 27, m. 



326 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Gronovius's Flora Virginica, 92, n. 24 ; 

133, n. 12, 
Groton, case of hysteria in, 27 ; quaint 

uses of words in, 108, log. 
Gullah dialect, 135, n. 16. 

Hakewill's Apologia, 15, m. ; 17, m. ; 

36, n. 3 ; 37, n. 6 ; 41, n. 12 ; Deo- 

dati's Letter in Appendix to, 53, m. ; 

54, m. ; 174, m. ; 197, n. 11. 
Declaration of the Providence 

of God, 126, m. 
Hale, Sir Matthew, jurist, superstition 

of, 23. 
Hall, Bishop, prose of, almost as lofty 

as Milton's verse, 17 ; relates death 

of a philosopher for reasoning about 

thunderstorms, 18 ; ascribes thun- 

dei'bolts to good angels, 19 ; on 

evil spirits, 24 ; opinion of cures 

without contaction, 60. 
Halle, John, in preface to Lanfranke's 

Chirurgerie, 93, n. 29. 
Halliwell's English Dialects, 135-136, 

n. 19. 
Hall's Cases of Conscience, 24, m. ; 

citing Thesaurum Exorcismorum, 

57, m. ; 60, m. 

Invisible World, 17, m. ; 18, m. 

Satires, 37, n. 6 ; 114; 258, n. 3, 

Hammond's Leah and Rachel, 158, 

m. 
Hanson's Old Kent, 198, n. 16. 
Harleian Miscellany, 13, m. ; 116, m. ; 

181, m. ; 204, n. 29 ; 267, n. 21 ; 

312, n. 17. 
Harrison's Description of Britaine, in 

Holinshed, 15, m. ; 42, n. 12 ; 116, 

m. ; 117, m. ; 210, m. ; 26S, n. 25 ; 

294, m. 
Hartford, actions of gentle devil in, 

25- 
Hartwell, Blair and Chilton's Present 

State of Virginia, 224, m. ; 272, n. 

31- 

Harvard, John, legacy of, for Harvard 
College, 247 ; library a part of, 121 ; 
source of inspiration of, 268, n. 23. 

Harvard College, hospitable to new 
opinions, 50 ; student at, beaten 
for blasphemy, 148 ; attempt to 
compel conversation in Latin at, 
failed, 215 ; first graduate of, an 
Indian, 226 ; contribution for, from 
the sale of indigent children, 227 ; 
peck of corn from each family for, 



229 ; graduates of, finding bene- 
fices in England, 229 ; ran down 
and kicked about as a political 
football, 235 ; younger pupils gave 
trouble at, 236 ; hours for meals at, 
240 ; master at, dismissed for bar- 
barous punishment of his usher, 
243 ; older students at, not to be 
beaten, 244 ; foundation of, 247 ; 
poor scholars prominent in early 
appeals for, 260, n. 9. 

Harvard students placed in catalogue 
according to social position, 143 ; 
unable to speak Latin in 1689, 259, 
n. 7. 

Harvey, William, discovered that 
every animal is from an egg, 41, n. 
12 ; expounded to his students the 
circulation of the blood, 48 ; his 
physiology not accepted by men 
over forty, 48 ; trouble with Dr. 
Pott in Virginia, 74 ; investigations 
of, broadened the field of human 
thought, 79 ; reverence for tradition 
shown by, 80, n. i ; Life of, by 
Willis, 48, m. 

Harvey's Exercitatio de Motu Cordis, 
48, m. 

Prelectiones Anatomite Univer- 
salis, 48, m. ; 259, n. 6. 

Hatfield House Manuscripts, 66, m. ; 
87, n. 14 ; 114, m. 

Hawkins, Jane, suspected of familiar- 
ity with the devil, 19. 

Hazard State Papers, 201, n. 21. 

Health drinking deemed abominable, 
153 ; law against, evaded, 196, n. 8 ; 
when introduced into England, 196, 
n. 8. 

Heat favorable to imagination, 81, 
n. 4. 

Heathen parents, no room for salva- 
tion of infants of, 200, n. 21. 

Hell, the Puritan's, 173 ; the fire of, 
how fed, 174. 

Henderson's School of Salernum, 82, 
n. 7 ; 95, n. 30. 

Hening's Statutes, 221, m. ; 249, m. ; 
250, m. ; 262, n. 14. 

Herbs, fancied resemblance between 
American and European, 67; names 
of European and their virtues given 
to American, 68 ; supposed to have 
pharmaceutical value, 68. 

Hermetic medicine, doctrine of, held 
by Winthrop the younger, 55. 



Index. 



327 



Hibernation of migratory birds, 13 ; 

in the satellites, 13. 
Hickory, derivation of, 107 ; nut called 

walnut, 133, n. 12. 
Hippocrates used venesection with 

caution, 52. 
Hippocrates, Aphorisms of, 50, m. ; 

52, m. ; 80, n. 3 ; 83, n. 7. 
" Hired man" and "hired girl," 113. 
Histoire des Filibustiers, 149, m. 
Historical Manuscript Commission. 

See Manuscript Commission. 
Hit, for it, couil English in Elizabeth's 

time, 112. 
Holiness made merely relative, 172. 
Holinshed, 15, m. ; 257, n. i ; 312, n. 

17- 
Holland, school system in, 232. 
Holy Club of Oxford, 167. 
Home-lot right, 279 ; 282. 
Hominy, derivation of, 105. 
Homocentric notions of the world, 56. 
Hone's Every Day Book, quoting 

London Times, 46, n. 17. 
Hooker, in Connecticut, made gov- 
ernment auxiliary of the churches, 

147 ; paper of, to prove the ensign 

harmless, 151 ; held that Sunday 

began at sunset on Saturday, 160. 
Hooker's Summe of ChurchDiscipline, 

201, n. 21. 
Hornbooks, Latin in, 209 ; described, 

212. 
Horoscopes, mysteries of, little known, 

6. 
Horse's mane tangled by witches, 

118. 
Hoskyns's Systems of Land Tenure, 

307, n. I. 
Hours, school, 239, 240 ; in English 

schools, 269, n. 26. 
House, delivery of possession of, 276. 
Houses haunted, 25, m. 
Howard's Collection of Letters, 136, 

n. 19. 
Howell, James, on witches, 21, 22. 
Howell's Familiar Letters, 4, m. ; 21, 

m. ; 53, m. ; 86, n. 12 ; 87, n. 14 ; 

126, m. ; 25S, n. 3. 
Huarte's, Juan, Examen de Ingenios 

para las Sciencias, 81, n. 4. 
Hubbard's Massachusetts, 206, n. 34. 
Hull, John, Diary of, 103, m. ; 205, 

n. 31. 
Humanity made slight progress in 

seventeenth century, 307. 
22 



Humble Advice of the Assembly of 
Divines concerning a Confession of 
Faith, The, 145 ; 200, n. 20. 

Humors of human body congealed by 
Saturn, 37, n. 4 ; relation of each 
one to elements, 50 ; qualities of, 51 ; 
mixtures and wrong doings of, 51, 
52 ; black, cured by milk, 57 ; vital 
products of putrid, 40, n. 11. 

Hundred, the, and the borough, 
285. 

Hunter, Governor of New York, cen- 
sus taken by, 192. 

Husband's Authority Unveiled, The, 
142, m. 

Husk, word used for bran, 132-133, 
n. 10. 

Hutchinson, Goodman, complained of 
prisoners for tormenting his wife, 

Hutchinson, Mrs., doctress, services of, 
freely given, 78. 

Hutchinson Papers, 19, m. ; 154, m. 

Hutchinson's, Francis, Historical Es- 
say on Witchcraft, 21, m. ; 23, m. ; 
46, n. 17 ; the best, 47, n. 20. 

Hypnotism, not recognized as due to 
natural causes, 26 ; girls at Salem 
show symptoms of, 30. 

Hysteria, not recognized as due to 
natural causes, 26 ; case of, in Gro- 
ton, Mass., 27 ; girls at Salem show 
symptoms of, 30. 

Idol called a mawmet (Mahomet), 

lOI. 

Idolatry, scruples about, 150, 15 1. 
Illiteracy in the colonies, 235. 
Imagination set on edge by theologi- 
cal speculation, 19. 
Immigration, Puritan, ceased about 

1640, 229. 
Indian college at Henrico, benefactors 

for, 220. 
Indian corn, names for, 102 ; staple 

food product of colonists, 104. 
" Indian " doctors plying trade, 73. 
Indian harvest, later ingathering of 

maize so called, 103. 
Indian massacre of 1622 attributed to 

sins in the colony, 149. 
Indian remedies overestimated, 73. 
Indian summer, name of, taken from 

Indian harvest, 104. 
Indian words unhandy vehicles for 

gossiping, 106, 107. 



328 



Tlie Transit of Civilization. 



Indians, American, doctrine of like 
cures like part of medical theory of, 
82, n. 7 ; cured wounds by sucking, 
g3, n. 28 ; cauterized with punk in- 
stead of cupping, 93, n. 28. 

Indians, captive, sold into slavery in 
Massachusetts, 306. 

Infants, damnation of unbaptized, 
174; 176; 208; foredoomed, argue 
their case at the day of doom, 176 ; 
damned for Adam's sin, 177 ; elect, 
are saved by faith, 202, n. 23 ; 
Quakerism denied damnation of, 
203, n. 26. 

Ingle's Letter in Historical Collections 
relating to the Colonial Church, 260, 
n. 9. 

Inheritance in the colonies, 291-293. 

Inkhorne termes, 129, n. 2. 

Instruction, wholly secular, unknown, 
238. 

Interest, scruple against taking, 191. 

Ireland, renowned monasteries of, 
208 ; called Jack's Land, 289. 

Irish rebels, curses on the, 179. 

Isensee's Geschichte der Medecin, 49, 
m. 

Italy, fashions of all sorts from, 103. 

Jack's Land, 289. 

Jag, a fraction of a wagon load. III. 
James's, King, Demonology, 45, n. 17. 
James, the pirate, captured transport 

ships, 299. 
Jeffreys, George, and the Mayor of 

Bristol, 301. 
Jesuit missionaries learned medicinal 

value of cinchona, 68. 
Jesuit Relations, Burrow's reprint of, 

131, n. 7. 
Jewell, Bishop, works of, 200, n. 21. 
Jingle, the familiar mnemonic " thirty 

days hath September," antiquity of, 

116, 117. 
Jones's, Hugh, Present Slate of Vir- 
ginia, 127, m. ; 184, m. ; 223, m. ; 

251, m. ; 263, n. 14. 
Johnson's Dictionary, 130, n. 6. 
Johnson's Ecclesiastical Laws, 255- 

256, n. I. 
Johnson's Higher Education in Rhode 

Island, 239, m. 
Johnson's Old Maryland Manors, 238, 

m. ; 286, m. ; 289, m. 
Jonson's, Ben, Alchemist, 40, n. 11 ; 

151. ni. 



Jonson's, Ben, Gypsies, 169, m. 

Josselyn on spontaneous generation, 
10 ; on marvelous occurrences, 16 ; 
" God created nothing in vain," 68 ; 
an assiduous herb gatherer, 69 ; list 
of American remedies by, 70 ; de- 
scription of nightingales in New 
England, lOO ; on cormorants, 
182. 

Josselyn's Chron. Obs., 7, m. 

Two Voyages, 64, m. ; 68, m. ; 

70, m. ; 92, n. 25. 
Journal of Sarah Eve, 117, m. 
Judseus's, Philo, Creation of the 

World, 81, n. 3. 
Judaism and the Puritan conscience, 

160, 161. 
Judd's Hadley, 64, m. ; 113, m. ; 143, 

m. ; 154, m. ; 237, m. ; 244, m. ; 

271, n. 29. 
Jusseraud's English Wayfaring Life, 

260, n. 9. 
Juvenis's, Joannes, De Medicamentis 

Bezoardicis, 64, m. ; 90, n. 20. 

Kalm's Travels, 44, n. 13; 69; 135, 
n. 18. 

Kendall, An order touchinge the Free 
School in, 211, m. 

Kepler developed foundations of mod- 
ern astronomy, 3 ; followed Coper- 
nicus, 4 ; an astrologer, 5. 

Kepler's De Cometis, 4, m. ; 7, m. ; j, 
38, n. 8. _ _ \ 

Harmonicus Mundi, 4, m. ' 

Kilty's Landholder's Assistant, 286, 
m. 

King, submission to, dodged by Cot- 
ton, 146. 

King's Majesties Declaration to his 
Subjects, The, 197, n. 12. 

King's, Henry, Sermon at St. Paul's, 
37. n. 6. 

Knap, Elizabeth, contortions and rav- 
ings of, 27 ; susceptible to hypnotic 
influence, 27. 

Knife sticking in the floor a lucky 
sign, 117. 

Knight's Life of Colet, 240, m. ; 241, ^ 
m. ; 269, n. 26. j 

Knight's Questio Quodlibetica, 206, , 
n. 36. j 

Knox's, John, system of schools for 
Scotland, 232. 

Konig's, Emanuel, Regnum Animale, 

71, m. ; 85, n. 10 ; 93, n. 27. 



Index. 



329 



Labadist's Journal, 70. 

Laborers, English, bound themselves 
to service, 297. 

Labors ceased every Saturday at three 
o'clock, i6i. 

Laing, James, contempt of, for vulgar 
tongues, 129, n. i. 

Lambert's History of New Haven and 
Milford, 9, m. ; 73, m. ; 161, m. ; 
162, m. 

Land, tracts of, reserved for the sup- 
port of churches and local schools, 
261, n. II ; little, held through feu- 
dal tenure, 274 ; communal holding 
of, primitive, 277 ; disposal of, by 
the town in New England, 278 ; 
distribution of, 282 ; processioning 
of, 291 ; 309, n. 8 ; held after the 
tenure of East Greenwich, 292. 

Land and labor in the early colonies, 

273- 

Land law, one trait of, survived from 
the middle ages, 275 ; 307, n. 3. 

Land-law terms, a jargon of, in Eng- 
land, 273 ; 307, n. I. 

Land laws held to simplicity, 274. 

Land tenure in Massachusetts and 
New England, 292. 

Land warrants passed as current mon- 
ey, 276. 

Landholding the direct ownership of 
the soil, 275. 

Landholdings, development of large, 
in Virginia, 224. 

Landlord must give security for ten- 
ant, 289. 

Lane to Walsingham, 102, m. 

Language, enriching of the, with Latin 
and French terms inevitable, 129, 
n. 2. 

Latham's Life of Sydenham, 68, m. 

Latin, barbarous mediaeval, used in 
records, 209 ; a gentleman's accom- 
phshment, 222 ; all ministers should 
know, 225 ; few students of, 230 ; 
each church in Scotland to have a 
schoolmaster to teach, 232 ; crowded 
out by English studies, 236 ; widely 
diffused knowledge of, in middle 
ages, 257, n. i ; constant use of, ob- 
ligatory in English universities, 259, 
n. 7 ; colloquial use of, never found 
lodgment in America, 259, n. 7. 

Latin schools, founding of, 209 ; 211 ; 
small need of, by tobacco planters, 
222. 



Latin verses, the producing of, 217. 

Laud's Conference with Fisher, 175, m. 

Laws called liberties in Massachu- 
setts, 274 ; earliest were simple and 
direct, 274. 

l,awyers forbidden in the colonial 
courts, 273 ; 307, n. 2 ; but one 
among the Dutch, 274. 

Leaming and Spicer's Grants and 
Ceremonies of New Jersey, 309, n. 8. 

Learned, the, devoured the atrocious 
stories of Pliny, 16. 

Lechford's Plaine Dealing, 201, n. 21 ; 
204, n. 31. 

Lee, Mary, hanged as witch at sea, 20. 

Lemnius's, Levinus, De Miraculis Oc- 
cultis Naturae, 40, n. 11; 61, m. ; 
89, n. 16. 

Leniency protested against, 180. 

Lents, keeping of three, a year, 208. 

Le Page du Pratz's Histoire de la 
Louisaine, 131, n. 6. 

Lescarbot's La Conversion des Sav- 
vages, 131, n. 7. 

Letters of Missionaries, 20, m. 

Lewis's Lynn, 189, m. 

Libraries, typical, of the scholar, 123. 

Library, a Virginia, of five volumes, 
122. 

Library, making a, by transcription, 
140, n. 25. 

Library of All Faith's Parish, 138, n. 
21. 

Lilly's Grammar, 215. 

Lincoln's Worcester, 235, m. ; 237, m. 

Liruelo's, P., Reprouacion de las Su- 
perstitiones, 21, m. 

Literature, American, 123. 

Livermore's Republic of New Haven, 
Town Records in, 236, m. 

Livery of seizin, 275 ; 307, n. 3 ; went 
out of use, 276. 

Lives of the Norths, 219, m. ; 247, m. 

Livingston and Smith's Laws of New 
York, 309, n. 8. 

Local feeling had the intensity of pa- 
triotism in England, 108. 

Logic the main study in all higher in- 
stitutions, 246. 

London Dispensatory, 86-87, "• "4 > 
94. n- 30. 

Longfellow's Evangeline, 71, m. 

Lord Bateman, Scottish-English bal- 
lad of, became American, 119. 

Lorrayne, physician of Faculty of 
Montpellier, 86, n. 14 ; 87, n. 14. 



330 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Lovell's History of Animals and Min- 
erals, 43, n. 12 ; 71, m. ; 85, n. 10. 

Lowly, justice demanded for the, in 
the name of religion, 195, n. i. 

Ludwell MSS., 241, m. 

Luther, Martin, first Protestant ex- 
ample of extreme faith in witch- 
craft, 45, n. 16. 

Magistrate, a, sentenced his own 
daughter to the whipping-post, 193. 

Magistrates, criticism of, little less 
than blasphemy, 144 ; outvoted by 
representatives of the towns, 284. 

Magnetism, operation of weapon oint- 
ment and powder of sympathy at- 
tributed to, 59. 

Maize called Saracen corn, 102, 103 ; 
only a book word in America to- 
day, 103 ; Indian names for dishes 
prepared from, 105 ; Pliny's de- 
scription of millet intended for, 131, 
n. 7 ; confused with buckwheat, 
131, n. 7. 

Malgaine's Introduction to Pares 
works, 82, n. 7 ; 94, n. 29 ; 95, n. 
30. 

Manifesto filosofico contra los Come- 
tas, by Sigurenza y Gorgora, op- 
posed popular dread, 39, n. 8. 

Manners, reformation of, by appeal to 
law, 167. 

Manors entailed in England, 286 ; 
parts of mere village communities, 
286. 

IManuscript Book of Instructions, 103, 
m. 

Manuscript Commission, 78, m. ; 82, 
n. 6 ; 211, m. ; 256, n. i ; 261, n. 9 ; 
267, n. 21. 

Manuscript county records in Virginia 
State Library, 54, m. 

Manuscripts, transcripts of printed 
books, 128. 

Maranta's De Theriaca at Mithridatio, 
64, m. ; 83, n. 7. 

Marriage at the hands of clerks, 184. 

Marsden's Early Puritans, 139, n. 
21. 

Marshall's Rural Economy, 278 ; 30S, 
n. 5. 

Maryland, reading and writing hardly 
known in parts of, 238 ; a " school 
for humanities " begun in, 238 ; 
laws passed for promoting Latin 
free schools in, 239. 



Maryland Archives, 144, m. ; 164, m. ; 
262, n. II. 

Maryland Council Proceedings, 20, m. 

Maryland Historical Society Publica- 
tions, No. 9, 238, m. 

Massachusetts, Constitution of, framed 
in 1641, 274. 

Massachusetts Archives, MS. Invoice 
in, 212, m. 

Massachusetts General Court under- 
took to send kidnapped negroes 
back to Africa, 305. 

Massachusetts Historical Collections, 
vol. i, 45, n. 14 ; 145, m. ; vol. iii. 
100, m. ; vol. iv, 190, m. ; vol. vi, 
78, m. ; 140, n. 25 ; 248, m. 

Massachusetts Historical Society Pro- 
ceedings, 58, m. ; Bennett MS. in, 
164, m. ; Stoughton's Letter in, 
151, m- 

Massachusetts law of 1641 against 
"cruellie," 182. 

Massachusetts Liberties, 144, m. 

Massachusetts Records, 19, m. ; 20, m. ; 
142, m. ; 150, m. ; 151, m. ; 154, m. ; 
160, m, ; 196, n. 8 ; 225, m. ; 227, 
m. ; 229, m. 

JNIasson's Life of Milton, 129, n. 2 ; 
246, m. 

Master's degree at Harvard, subjects 
for, 36, n. 3 ; 50, m. 

Mather, Cotton, on existence of un- 
seen satellite, 14 ; ascribes thunder- 
bolts to work of devils, 19 ; shout 
of victory amid horrors at Salem, 
28 ; never acknowledged himself 
wrong, 34 ; never forgiven for ac- 
tions during Salem witchcraft, 34 ; 
had great hopes of what good angels 
might do for him, 45, n. 15 ; on Wait 
Winthrop as a doctor, 93, n. 27. 

Mather's, Cotton, Magnalia, 189, m. ; 
196, n. 6 ; 203, n. 25. 

, Memorable Providences Relat- 
ing to Witchcraft and Possessions, 
30. 

, Ornaments for the Daughters of 

Zion, 95, n. 31. 

, Ratio Discipline, 152, m. ; 189, 

m. ; 206, n. 33. 

Mather, Increase, relish of, for the 
supernatural and sensational, 7, 8 ; 
conception of devils in chains, 24 ; 
Puritan ramshorn of, 28 ; bishop by 
brevet of New England, 30 ; books 
of, on eclipses, 30. 



Index 



:)0 



Mather's, Increase, Cases of Con- 
science, 26, m. 

, Heaven's Alarm to the World, 8. 

, Kometographia, 8. 

, Latter Sign Discoursed of, 8. 

, Meditations on the Sanctifica- 

tion of the Lord's Day, 161, m. 

, Remarkable Providences, 18, m. ; 

19, m. ; 23, m. ; 24, m. ; 25, m. ; 28, 
m. ; 30 ; 41, n. 12 ; 46, n. 17 ; 92- 
93, n. 25 ; 105, m. ; 136, n. 19. 

Matthseus's, Antonius, De Criminibus, 
ig6, n. 7. 

Meals in the reigns of Elizabeth and 
James, 268, n. 25. 

Medical professors, one of the most 
famous in Europe a woman, 78. 

Medical students in Massachusetts, 
lack of knowledge in, 79. 

Medical theory expansive, 66. 

Medical tradition, persistence of, 66. 

Medicinal virtue attributed to precious 
and rare things, 60. 

Medicine, dabblers in, 53 ; mystical 
tendency of, 58 ; in hands of clergy 
and women, 76 ; decline of colonial, 
78 ; modern scientific born in seven- 
teenth century, 79. 

Medicines administered when moon 
was in proper sign, 5 ; 36, n. 4 ; 
to be given in odd numbers, 81, 
n. 3. 

Meehan's Monthly on American dit- 
tany, 67, m. 

Meeting, a young man whipped for 
not going to, on Sunday, 162. 

Meeting-house substituted for church, 
189. 

Meeting-houses, seats in New Eng- 
land, " dignified," 143. 

Melville, Andrew, in McCrie's I/ife of 
Knox, 266, n. 21. 

Men of the woods, 127. 

Mental furniture, antique, of the emi- 
grants, 117. 

Mercurial remedies, 60 ; 83, n. 16. 

Merrymount, Maypole at, cut down, 
153- 

Mesmerism not recognized as due to 
natural causes, 26. 

Michaelmas Protestantized into Mi- 
heltide, 151. 

Midwife officially appointed in New 
Amsterdam, 77. 

Milk for Babes, in Prince Library, 
Boston, 161, m. 



Milton, John, a Puritan at the time 
of Cotton, 2 ; artistic passion of, 3 ; 
sonnet of, on Kingship of God, 17 ; 
classic dignity of his evil angels, 22 ; 
beaten by his tutor at Cambridge, 
244 ; disappointed in the univer- 
sity, 246 ; his opinion of universi- 
ties, 247. 

Milton's University Oration, 41, n. 12. 

Minister, the one educated man in the 
parish in New England, 287 ; domi- 
nance of, over the unlettered com- 
plete, 287. 

Ministers act as soothsayers and play 
showmen of monstrous births, 16 ; 
two, in each church in New Eng- 
land, 185 ; all, should know Latin, 
225 ; want of able, in Virginia, 249. 

Mitchell's Past in the Present, 86, n. 13. 

Mithridate, belief in virtues of, 63. 

Mithridates discovered a universal 
antidote, 63. 

Moisture essential to memory. Si, n. 4. 

Moli^re's Malade Imaginaire, 52, m. ; 
80, n. 3. 

Moli^re's Medecin Malgr^ Lui, 87, 
n. 14. 

Monarchy and aristocracy both ap- 
proved in Scripture, ig6, n. 5. 

Monardes, first Spanish edition of, 92, 
n. 23 ; English edition, 65, m. ; on 
bloodstone, 71, m. ; 90, n. 20; 92, 
n. 23. 

Monasteries, suppression of the, near- 
ly abolished the education of the 
times, 210 ; the British, Irish, and 
Saxon, 255, n. i ; perfect organiza- 
tion of the Catholic, 255, n. i. 

Monmouth's rebellion, sale of the 
rebels of, 301. 

Monstrosities and marvels noted by 
members of the Royal Society, 16. 

Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, 46, 
n. 18. 

Months, scniples against ordinary 
names of, 152. 

Moon, influence of the, 5, 6 ; 37, n. 
5, n. 6 ; 130, n. 3 ; winter home of 
migratory birds, 14. 

Moral History of Frugality, 165, m. 

Moral law made moral by divine com- 
mand, 145. 

Moral passion of the present age, 141. 

Morality, ideal of, abrogated, 172. 

Morton, Charles, elaborated theory of 
hibernation in the satellites, 13, 14 ; 



332 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



in Harleian Miscellany, 13, m. ; 
vice president of Harvard, 45, n. 
14 ; lectures on philosophy, 45, n. 
14. 

Morton's New English Canaan, 133, 
n. II. 

Movertus, first authoritative writer on 
insects in England, 39, n. 10 ; 40, 
n. II. 

Mugwump, an honorary title of lead- 
ership, 107. 

Mulcaster on perfumes, 93, n. 26 , 
advocated flogging, 242. 

Mulcaster's Positions, 18S, m. ; 210, 
m. ; 240, m. ; 257, n. i ; 258, n. 3 ; 
270-271, n. 29. 

Miiller's Science of Language, 43, n. 
12. 

Music, obsolescence of, in New Eng- 
land, 188. 

Music books, scruple against using, in 
service, 187. 

Muskrat, other names for, 105, 106. 

Mystic philosophy, salt, mercury, and 
sulphur the three elements in, 83, 
n. 7. 

Mythology, picturesque, of seven- 
teenth century, 18. 

Names, pagan, giving of, to children 
opposed, 190 ; Hebrew, for chil- 
dren, 191 ; nouns, verbs, and par- 
ticiples used as, 191. 

Nation, The, April 22, 1897, 264, n. 
16. 

Natives prohibited from powwowing, 

153- 

Necromancer " blown up " in Boston 
Harbor, 19. 

Negro, philanthropic exertion for, at 
first wholly religious, 304. 

Negro speech as various as the tribes, 
III ; words in modern dialect of 
Surrey, 112 ; preserved the worst 
in seventeenth century English, 
112. 

Negroes the cursed descendants of 
Cain, 303 ; confounded with the 
Moors, 303 ; bondage of, justified 
by their heathen condition, 304. 

Neill's Educational Development of 
Virginia, 221, m. 

Neill's Virginia Vetusta, 262, n. 11. 

New Amsterdam, impossible to en- 
force a strict Sabbath in, 165. 

Newbury, actions of a spirit in, 25. 



New England almanac for 1649, 
unique copy of, in New York Tub- 
lie Library, 39, n. 9. 

New England Chronicle, 188, m. 

New England cradled in religious en- 
thusiasms, 159 ; benevolence of, or- 
ganized and systematic, 288. 

New England Primer, Introduction 
to Ford's reprint of, 213, m. 

New England Psalm Book, preface to, 
186, m. ; 188 ; 202, n. 27 ; the so- 
called "Bay Psalm Book," 188, m. 

New England Synod of 1679, 205, n. 31. 

New-Englander, the, always a mem- 
ber of a community, and therefore 
civilized, 283 ; close-fisted and 
shrewd, 288 ; schooled in the town 
debates, 2S8. 

New Engli-h Dictionary, 212, m. 

Newgate birds shipped to America, 
300. 

New Haven Colony Records, 226, m. ; 
268, n. 24. 

Newman's Rehoboth, 308, n. 5. 

Newport the great center of the 
Guinea trade, 306. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, in praise of Boyle's 
reticence, 89, n. 18. 

New York Historical Collections, 261, 
n. II. 

New York Society Library, remains 
of Winthrop's library in, 121. 

Nichol's English Poor Law, 193, m. 

Nichol's Poor Laws, 312, n. 17. 

Nightingale, various birds so named, 
100, lOI. 

Niles's French and Indian Wars, 78. 

North and South, contrast between, 
286 ; 288. 

Norton, John, the Massachusetts Cal- 
vin, 145. 

Norton's, Prof. C. E., Life of Anne 
Bradstreet, 139, n. 23. 

Notes and Queries, vol. vi, 23, m. 

Nowell's, Alexander, Cambridge Al- 
manac, 6, m. ; 36, n. 3 ; 38, n. 7. 

Noyes's, James, The Temple Meas- 
ured, 204, n. 31. 

Nugre Antique, 189, m. 

Numeration, passion for, emigrated to 
America, 81, n. 3. 

Observation, habit of shrewd, com- 
pelled by exigent wants, 12. 

O'Callaghan's History of New Nether- 
lands, 77 m. ; 139, n. 21. 



Index. 



333 



O'Callaghan's Laws of New Nether- 
lands, 165. 

Offenses, trifling, magnified, 153, m. 

Olaus, Magnus, boolt of unbelievable 
things in the sixteenth century by, 

13 ; 43. n- 13- 

Oliver, Mrs., publicly whipped for 
reproaching Massachusetts magis- 
trates, 144. 

Opinions, heretical, punished with 
death, 148, 149. 

Ordeal by water used in trial of 
witches, 45, n. 17. 

Ord's Life of Wilson, 44, n. 13. 

Ordronneaux's Code of Health, 95, 

n. 31- 

Organs, scarcity of, 18S. 

Ovid on life from putrefaction, quoted 
by later writers, 10. 

Owen to E. Harley, 78, m. 

Oysters not to be used in months with- 
out the letter r, 1 16. 

Paganism, long-distance, 152. 

Pagans, Christians dominated, by 
right divine, 153. 

Palingenesis rejected by Rolfink, 41, 
n. 12. 

Palmer's Island, fruitless endeavor to 
plant an academy upon, 262, n. rr. 

Paracelsian books, shelf neighbors of 
Harvey and Culpepper, 54. 

Paracelsian school, writers of, revised 
old doctrine of signatures, 55 ; An- 
gelus Sala a member of the, 88, n. 16. 

Paracelsus, doctor of fire, 53 ; doctrine 
of signatures ascribed to, 55 ; cured 
like by Hke, 56 ; 83, n. 7 ; used St. 
John's-wort to drive away phan- 
tasms, 57 ; black powder of, 85, n. 
10. 

Paracelsus's De Cutis Apertionibus, 
56, m. ; 83, n. 7. 

De Naturalibus Rebus, 84, 

n. 8. 

Opera, 57, m. 

Paradise Lost largely history to con- 
temporary readers, 18. 

Parasites bred from the body on which 
they lived, 11 ; sign of misery and 
scourge of God, 40, n. 11. 

Pare, Ambroise, drew seven pounds of 
blood from a man in four days, 53 ; 
works of, 46, n. 19 ; 53, m. ; 86, n. 
13 ; 91, n. 20, n. 22 ; denounced 
weapon ointment, 86, n. 13. 



Fare's, Ambroise, Surgery, 54. 

Parish, the, of primary importance, 
283. 

Parish vestry, the, in Virginia and the 
South, 290 ; transacts all town or 
county business, 290. 

Parker, Chief-Justice, declaration of, 
against swimming witches, 46, n. 
17- 

Parsons, tavern-haunting, put up with, 
175- 

Pastorate, the double, 185 ; in Hol- 
land, 205, n. 32 ; gone to decay, 
205, n. 31. 

Paulet, Robert, sent to Virginia as 
parson, esteemed as physician, 76. 

Peacham's Compleat Gentleman, 1660, 
account of system of Ptolemy in, 35, 
n. I ; on members of medical pro- 
fession, 94, n. 39 ; 139, n. 23 ; 243, 
m. ; edition of 1661, 141, m. 

Peacock pies concocted from turkey, 
102. 

Peasley, Heniy, founds a free school 
in Virginia, 221. 

Pedro porco, sold for price of pearls, 
65 ; go, n. 20. 

Penhallow on eastern Indian wars, 
198, n. 15. 

Penmanship, elaborate, taught, 218. 

Penn, William, bought condemned 
rebels, 302 ; concerned for the souls 
of the blacks, 305. 

Pennypacker's Historical and Bio- 
graphical Sketches, 102, m. ; 240, m. 

Pennyroyal, American, virtues of dit- 
tany transferred to, 67 ; poisonous 
to rattlesnakes, 67. 

Perfumes, value of, for sickness, 93, 
n. 26. 

Perkins's Cases of Conscience, 144, 
m. ; 204, n. 29. 

Perry's Collections, Virginia, 223, m. 

Peruvian bark in malarial diseases, 

69- . 

Pews, exclusive, of the great families, 

143- 
Pharisaism, unbearable burden of, 

162 ; stage in human progress, 194. 
Pharmacopoeias ignored medicines of 

the alchemists and Rosicrucians, 

63 ; loathsome substances found in, 

72 ; for use of animal substances 

consult, 93, n. 27. 
Phlegm, curious notions about, 80, 

n. 2. 



334 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Physic in the hands of old women and 

the clergy, 95, n. 30.^ 
Pictet's Tableau des Etats Unis, 194, 

n. I. 
Piers Ploughman, prologus, 308, n. 6. 
Pigeons, flights of, 9 ; 14 ; 39, n. 9 ; 

applied to draw out poison, 87, n. 

14. 
Pine cones, green, remove wrinkles, 

70. 
Pioneers have no time to invent, 232. 
Planter, the Southern, independence 

of the, 287 ; sons of, averse to com- 
merce, 288. 
Plants, American, popular use of, 69 ; 

opinions regarding medicinal value 

of, 92, n. 23. 
Plato's Minos, 196, n. 7. 
Pleasure in the disasters of opponents, 

166. 
Pliny, " the greatest gull of antiquity," 

16. 
Pliny's Historise de Gentibus Sep- 

trionalibus, 13, m. 
Plymouth Records, 150, m. ; 19S, n. 

15. . . . 

Pocahontas, title of princess given to, 

99- 
Po^me Sur I'Elixir Royal, 84, n. 8. 
Politeness the virtue of childhood, 

214 ; rules of, in verse, 214. 
Politics, platform of, found by Cotton 

in the Scriptures, 147. 
Poole's Dialect of Forth and Bargy, 

no, m. 
Poor, how to be rid of the, the prob- 
lem of England, 293 ; sent a-wan- 

dering, 294. 
Population in 1650, 2. 
Porcupine, viscera of, searched for 

bezoar stones, 65 ; 90, n. 20. 
Porta's, John Baptist, Magia Natu- 

ralis, 10, m. ; 40, n. 10 ; 43, n. 12 ; 

85, n. II. 

Possession, picturesque delivery of, 
275 ; 307. n- 3 ; 308, n. 4. 

Pott, Dr., sent to Virginia, 53 ; meth- 
ods of, 54 ; only physician in Vir- 
ginia, 74. 

Powder, sympathetic, a cure of great 
notoriety, 59 ; stopped hemor- 
rhages, 59; 86, n. 12; much es- 
teemed, 63 ; called Zaphygian salt, 

86, n. 12. 

Prat's, Joseph, Order of Orthography, 
134, n. 14. 



Pratt, a surgeon of Cambridge, saved 
from banishment, 74. 

Preachers, education of, a matter of 
primary importance in New Eng- 
land, 225. 

Preaching a sacrament above sacra- 
ments to the Puritan mind, 225. 

Price, Miss S. F., technical informa- 
tion regarding dittany received 
from, 91, n. 22. 

Primer, the New England, 213. 

Primer, the third implement of learn- 
ing, 213. 

Primitive science, ideas of, 63. 

Primogeniture in the aristocratic colo- 
nies, 291 ; in Massachusetts and 
Pennsylvania, 292 ; swept away by 
the Revolution, 293. 

Primrose, Dr., adversary of Hai-vey, 
48 ; his voice the voice of the age, 
43. 

Prince's Annals, October 15, 1629, 
189, m. 

Printing presses, utter prohibition of, 
263, n. 14. 

Prisoners, at Salem, charged with tor- 
turing children, 32 ; cast into dun- 
geons, fettered, and tortured, 32 ; 
released by proclamation of the 
governor, 34. 

Processioning of land, 291 ; 309, n. 8. 

Productions, literary, in the first gen- 
eration belong to English letters, 
124. 

Prognostication by comets, 6. 

Pronunciation, awkward, of the pio- 
neer scribe, 234. 

Property, pagan had no right to such, 
as a Christian might have use for, 

153- 
Proverbial philosophy, our, dates from 
the time when epigrams were used, 

115- 

Proverbs the accepted coin of popular 
wisdom, 114 ; abounded in com- 
munities where utterance was tram- 
meled, 115; express smothered po- 
litical passion, 116. 

Psalm-singing, obligatory, 178 ; scru- 
ples about, 186 ; decay of, 187 ; 
" morall " and of pei-petual obliga- 
tion, 188 ; 203, n. 27. 

Psalms, George Sandys's metrical ver- 
sion of, 179. 

Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins's ver- 
sion of the, 178, 179; 213. 



hidex. 



335 



Pundits in Philadelphia who followed 
Olaus, 14. 

Punishment of students, law limiting, 
244. 

Punishments, variety of, 193. 

Purgatory abolished by the govern- 
ment, 257, n. 2. 

Puritanism tied to temporal laws of 
the Jews, 182 ; made one great 
contribution to human culture, 192 ; 
the weakness of, was the weakness 
of its age, 193 ; in New England 
felt recoil of Restoration of 1660, 
201, n. 21 ; small farmers suscep- 
tible to, 280. 

Puritans, the, looked on Elizabeth's 
rule with disfavor, 271, n. 29. 

Puritans and Precisians to conform or 
leave the country, 197, n. 12. 

Purvis's Laws of Virginia, 249, m. 

Putnam, Joseph, declared his detesta- 
tion of witchcraft, 33 ; carried child 
to Salem to be baptized, 33. 

Putrefaction produced life, 10 ; meat 
made tender under rays of moon a 
form of, 37, n. 5 ; creatures engen- 
dered by, 41, n. 12. 

Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, 
Arber's edition, 97, m. ; 98, m. ; 
129, n. 2. 

Quacks flourished in the colonies, 79. 
Quakers opposed to slavery, 305, 

306. 
Quarrel between minister and people 

at Salem village, 30. 
Quick, appendix to Mulcaster, 244, m. 
Quincy's History of Harvard College, 

45, n. 14 ; 227, m. ; 235, m. ; 241, 

m. ; 247, m. ; 259, n. 8. 
Quintessence, directions for alchemi- 
cal processes to attain, 89, n. 17. 
Quitrents the lord's half-penny, 282 ; 

paid by the town in New York, 

309, n. 8. 

Rainbows recorded with a " Laus 
Deo," 9. 

Rank, reverence for, 142. 

Rattlesnake, American, used medici- 
nally, 64 ; killed by smelling penny- 
royal, 67 ; skin of, worn as a girdle, 
71 ; antidotes for bite of, 66 ; 73 ; 
87, n. 14. 

Rawdon, Marmaduke, Camden So- 
ciety, No. 105, 90, n. 20. 
22 



Ray, John, on unicorns, in Harris's 

Voyages, 15, m. ; slow to believe 

Redi, 42, n. 12. 
Raynaud's, Maurice, Les M^decins 

au Temps de Moli^re, 52, m. ; 81, 

n. 4. 
Recesses, no regular, for play, in the 

schools, 240. 
Record Commission, Institutes Civil 

and Ecclesiastical, published by, 

195. n- I- 

Records of City of Canterbury, Ninth 
Report of Royal Commission on 
Historical MSS., 197, n. 10. 

Records of Massachusetts Colony, 
138, n. 20. 

Records of Virginia Colony, 220, m. ; 
310, n. 12. 

Recovery, common, forbidden by 
statute in Virginia, 292. 

Redemptioners as schoolmasters, 264, 
n. 16. 

Redi, advocate of Harvey's doctrines, 
42, n. 12 ; experiments of, showing 
that insects were not generated 
spontaneously, 42, n. 12. 

Reeves's History of Law, 273, m. 

Register of Christ's Church Parish, 
Middlesex County, Virginia, 109, m. 

Rehoboth, R. I., built in a semicircle, 
308, n. 5. 

Religion and beauty regarded as an- 
tagonists, 189. 

Religion treated as a mere propriety, 

Religious but ruthless spirit in all 
churches and parties, 166. 

Religious movements become political 
and social forces, 168. 

Remedy, no recovery without a, 71 1 
existence of a universal, 249. 

Renegades lost to their old lives in 
America, 297. 

Rents of the lord paid by the town, 
278. 

Report on Burgh and Middle Class 
Schools in Scotland, 240, m. ; 268, 
n. 26 ; 269, n. 26. 

Report, Third, of Commissioners on 
Education in Scotland, 266, n. 21. 

Reports of Clergy in Virgina Collec- 
tions, 222, m. 

Rest, Puritan mind had no concep- 
tion of, i6r, 162. 

Results of Three Synods, 144, m. ; 
163, m. ; 201, n. 21. 



336 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Retainers, liveried, of high sheriffs, 17. 
Retrospective Review, 23, m. ; 47, n. 

20 ; 196, n. 8. 
Revenge and religion commingled, 

179- 

Reverence, spectacular show of, made 
to judges and governors, 144. 

Rhazes on Smallpox, 52, m. 

Rhode Island, no mention of schools 
in the early colony records of 238 ; 
school at Bristol in 1682, 239 ; first 
organized into towns, 308, n. 5. 

Richard, Colonel Solomon, on bar- 
nacle geese, 43, n. 12. 

Richard's, Colonel Solomon, Disserta- 
tion sur la Possession des Corps 
par les Demons, 45, n. 15. 

Ridgely's Annals of Annapolis, 20, m. 

Ridley's View of the Law, 265, n. 18. 

Roasting ears an early name for green 
corn, 133, n. 10. 

Roberti, the Jesuit, ascribed wart cures 
to the devil, 60. 

Robinson, John, the sweet-hearted 
pastor of the Pilgrims, 176. 

Robinson's, John, Works, 202, n. 22. 

Rodach's, Phsedro von, Vom Stein der 
Weisen, 61, m. ; 88, n. 15 ; 88, n. 
16. 

Rode's, Hugh, Poke of Nurture, E. E. 
T. S., 114, m. 

Rogers's, Thorold, Work and Wages, 
257, n. I ; 289, m. ; 309, n. 8. 

Rogues made and hanged, 294. 

Rolfink, Werner, most learned of Ger- 
man anatomists, 41, n. 12 ; rejected 
palingenesis in book on chemistry, 
41, n. 12. 

♦' Roost-cock " in English use earlier 
than the time of colony planting, 
137, n. 19. 

" Rooster," a word produced by Amer- 
ican mock modesty, 137, n. 19. 

Rosicrucians, weapon ointment de- 
rived from, 58 ; sympathetic powder 
attributed to, 59 ; Gothic medicines 
traced to, 63. 

Roxburghe Library, Inedited Tracts, 
213, m. 

Roxbury, free school in, supported by 
householders, 226. 

Royal African Company of England, 

303- 
Royal College of Physicians, Roll of, 

77. m. 
Royal Comm. Gawdy MSS., 77, m. 



Royal Hist. MSS. Comm. Report, 8, 
m. ; Tenth Report, Appendix, 85, 
n. 9 ; 147, m. 

Royal Society, members of, investi- 
gated monstrosities, 16 ; relations 
of sympathetic cures and trials dis- 
cussed before, 86, n. 12 ; Virginia 
writer in Transactions, 133, n. 10. 

Royal Society Philosophical Transac- 
tions, Abridgment, 67, m. ; 73, m. 

Royal touch, colonists cut off from 
remedy by, 91, n. 21. 

Ruggles's History of Guilford, Conn., 
quoted in Judd's Hadley, 113, m. 

Ruminants in Chili and Peru yielded 
bezoar stones, 65. 

Runaways from Virginia in North 
Carolina, 298. 

Rush, John, of Salem, 275. 

Russell's Poke of Nurture, E. E. T. S., 
No. 32, 15, m. 

Rustic English, mixing up of variant 
forms of 134, n. 15. 

" Rye and Indian " known in eight- 
eenth century, 132, n. 9. 

Sabbatarianism, James I tried to check 
tide of, 156. 

Sabbath, observance of the, 157 ; di- 
vine reverence paid to the, 160 ; the 
New England, had become a fixed 
tradition, 163 ; Dr. Bownd's work 
on the, 160 ; a strict, contrary to the 
freedoms of Holland, 165 ; to be 
devoted to religious duties, 198, n. 
14. 

Sabbath breaking, first record of in- 
dictment for, 197, n. 10. 

Sabbath keeping, strict, widely accept- 
ed, 155 ; laxity in, brought judg- 
ments, 163 ; 198, n. 15. 

Sabbath law disregarded by early Vir- 
ginians, 158. 

Sackville, Sir Richard, complains of 
his "lewde schoolmaster," 242. 

Sainsbury's Calendar, 102, m. 

Saint, the prefix, omitted from familiar 
geographical names, 151. 

St. John's-wort, various medicinal uses 

of, 56. 57- 
Saint Paul's School, holidays allowed 

at, 241 ; foundation of, 257, n. 3. 
Sala, Angelus, ridiculed notion of 

drinkable gold, 88, n. 16. 
Salem village, a frontier town in 1692, 

29 ; had elements needed for witch- 



Index. 



337 



craft mania, 30 ; incredible glimpses 
of infernal world at, 30 ; population 
decreased and business of, suffered, 

34- 
Salerno, a woman the most skillful 

physician at the school of, 95, n. 30. 
Salmon's English Physician, 15, m. ; 

42, n. 12 ; 44, n. 13 ; 64, m. ; 84, n. 

9 ; 85, n. 10 ; Shroder quoted by, 

86, n. 12 ; recipes for making tinc- 
ture of gold in, SS, n. 16. 
Salvation, schemes of, an index of 

moral stress, i63. 
Sandys, George, poet secretary to the 

Virginia colony, 35, n. 2 ; rendered 

Ovid into English verse, 121 ; 123 ; 

looked upon the wilderness as an 

enemy, 126 ; metrical version of the 

Psalms, 179. 
Saturn, approach of, to be guarded 

against, 37, n. 4. 
Savage's Winthrop's Journal, 19, m. ; 

144, m. 
Scheltema's Geschiedenis der Hek- 

senprocessen, 46, n. 17 ; 47, n. 20. 
School, a, in each local community, 

required by a central authority, 

231 ; 236. 
School, American district, evolution 

of the, 209 ; 227, 228 ; 237. 
School and breakfast, 239. 
School, the dame, sprang up, 210 ; 

maintained at public expense, 237. 
School discipline, severity of, believed 

to be beneficial, 242. 
School holidays allowed, 241. 
School hours, 239, 240 ; in Aberdeen, 

268, n. 26. 
School law of 1647 in Massachusetts, 

motive of the, 228-231. 
School laws, tricks and shifts to evade 

the, 234. 
School life in the age of American 

settlement, 239. 
Schoolboys, breakfastless, 239; munch- 
ing breakfast bread along the road, 

240. 
Schoole of Vertue, The, 214. 
Schoolmasters, harshness of, discussed 

in Cecil's chamber, 241 ; beat their 

pupils " like stock-fishes," 242 ; 

think themselves best when they 

teach little and beat much, 270, n. 

28. 
Schools before the Reformation, 256, 



Schools, country, for mere reading and 
writing, 230, 231 ; sustained in part 
by enforced local taxation, 236 ; 
growth of, 237 ; began at six o'clock 
A. M., 239 ; kept cruelly long hours, 
240 ; rooms used for, 245. 

Schools, early Christian, 208, 209 ; old 
cathedral, supplied with lay teach- 
ers, 210. 

Schools, elementary, in Scotland in 
1494, and for Latin, 266, n. 21. 

Schools, free, founded by Henry VI, 
257, n. 3 : endowed out of spoils of 
monasteries, 258, n. 3. 

Schools, free, founded in Virginia, 
221 ; 262, n. 14. 

Schools, free grammar, for beginners 
in Latin, 214 ; scholars in the, ig- 
norant of English and of numbers, 
216; writing taught in the, 216; 
the universal remedy, 219, 220 ; 
modes of sustaining, in New Eng- 
land, 226, 227 ; tax rate for, 227 ; 
religious motive for, 227 ; agita- 
tions for, in New England, 229 ; 
established by Massachusetts law of 
1647, 230 ; decline of the Latin, 
235, 236; English schools, 267, n. 10; 
made obligatory by law, 265, n. 20. 

Schools, free Latin, zeal for the found- 
ing of, in England, 209, 210 ; exot- 
ics in Virginia, 222 ; found friend- 
ly environment in New England, 
225, 226 ; laws for promoting, in 
Maryland, 239 ; taught in Mary- 
land by indentured servants or con- 
victs, 264, n. 16. 

Schools, monastic, connected with our 
modern systems, 207. 

Schools, New England, decline of, 
265, n. 20. 

Schools, private, sprang up in Vir- 
ginia, 222 ; license fee exacted from, 
by Governor Howard, 223 ; off- 
spring of law of demand and supply, 
223 ; rustic, fairly numerous, 263, 
n. 14. 

Schopf, German botanist, 69. 

Schot's, Caspar, Physica Curiosa, 43, 
n. 12. 

Schotel's Oud Hollandsch Huisgezin 
der Zeventiende Eeuw, 211, m. ; 
257, n. 1 ; 267, n. 21 ; 270. n. 28. 

Scientific observation, lack of, in cen- 
turies preceding the eighteenth, 40, 
n. 10. 



338 



The Transit of Civilization. 



Scotland, each church in, to have a 
Latin teacher, 232. 

Scripture teaching, gentler side of, 
obscured, 178. 

Scruple-breeders, 186. 

Scruples at using the ring in marriage, 
189 ; minor, 190. 

Secular culture in Virginia, 158. 

Seebohm's The Salic Law, 2S9, m. 

Seebohm's Village Community, 308, 
n. 6, n. 7 ; 309, n. 8, 9. 

Seizin, livery of, 275 ; 307, n. 3. 

Self-interest in morals, 149. 

Separatists, English, held to duality 
of pastoral office, 185. 

Serfdom and apprenticeship, 293-295 ; 
motives for releasing from, 294; 302. 

Serfs granted freedom as fellow-Chris- 
tians, 302. 

Servant, title of, degraded, 113 ; fron- 
tiersmen unwilling to be called, 
135, n. 18 ; the sick, neglected, 298. 

Servants, apprenticed, treated as prop- 
erty, 296 ; horrors of the traffic in, 
296 ; sifting of, by Massachusetts 
colonists, 299 ; obtained from dan- 
gerous classes, 299 ; some prosper- 
ous, 300 ; slaves for a time in all 
but name, 313, n. 19. 

Servants, bond, shiploads of, in Vir- 
ginia and Maryland, 286 ; white, 
in excess of blacks in Virginia, 
286 ; 296 ; sold in great numbers, 
296 ; in the colonies, 296, 297 ; 
whippings of, 297, 298 ; secret bur- 
ial of, prohibited, 298 ; convict, 
300, 301. 

Servants, Dutch, fled to New Eng- 
land or Maryland, 298. 

Servants, English, fled to Dutch ter- 
ritory, 298. 

Settlements, opening of new, pro- 
duced demand for unskilled labor, 
302, 

Seven, the number, and its parts, 81, 
n. 3. 

Sewall, Judge, opposed importation 
of slaves to Massachusetts, 306. 

Sewall, Samuel, witch foolery believed 
by, 31 ; humble confession of, read 
at general fast, 34 ; annually kept 
day of humiliation, 34 ; on Eliot, 
the apostle, 204, n. 28. 

Sewall's Diary, 9, m ; 16, m. ; 77, m. ; 
137, n. 19 ; 148, m. ; 151, m. ; 152, 
m. ; 189, m. ; 211, m. 



Shakespeare and Milton, artistic pas- 
sions of, touched not the emigrants, 
3 ; quotation from Julius Caesar on 
humor, 51 ; punning form given to 
proverb by, 114 ; quotation from 
Romeo and Juliet about a witch, 
118. 

Sheep of a towTi in Connecticut paid 
all the corporate expenses, 282. 

Shell money, names for, 107. 

Shepard and Ransom in L. Swift on 
Election Sermons, 235, m. 

Shephard's Select Cases of Conscience, 
195, n. 3 ; Treatise on the Sabbath, 
195, n. 3. 

Short Account of Several Kinds of So- 
cieties, 167 m. 

Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 140, n. 
25 ; 163, m. ; 203, n. 24 ; 215, m. ; 
268, n. 23. 

Signatures, origin of doctrine of, 55 ; 

82, n. 7 ; theories concerning, 55, 
56; 69, 70; medicinal, 56; 70; 82, 

83, n. 7. 

Sigurenza, Gorgora, on popular dread 
of comets, 39, n. 8. 

Skepticism, wholesome scientific, born 
in the seventeenth century, 41, n. 
12. 

Slander, punishments prescribed for, 
194, n. I. 

Slaughter's History of the Parish, 
quoted in Anderson's Colonial 
Church, 78. 

Slave trade, Newport the great center 
of, 306. 

Slavery, an insignificant element of 
Virginia life in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, 198, n. 13 ; white, not done 
away in England till the eighteenth 
century, 295 ; more ancient than 
historic records, 303 ; black tide of, 
ever swelling, 307. 

Slaves, black, most useful appurte- 
nances of a plantation, 302 ; car- 
ried to Spanish colonies, 303. 

Slaves, first, in English America, 302 ; 
conversion of, did not invalidate 
his owner's claim, 304 ; efforts to 
convert, languid, 305 ; thousands 
of, sold into New England, 306. 

Slaves, white, six thousand in Vir- 
ginia, 296. 

Smith, Erminnie A., in Powell's Sec- 
ond Bureau of Ethnology Report, 
90, n. 19. 



Index. 



339 



Smith of Nibley Manuscripts, 74, m. ; 
122, m. ; 156, m. ; 261, n. 11 ; 285, 
m. ; 311, n. 13. 

Smith's History of New York, 192, m. 

Smith's Oxford Tract, 105, m. ; ic6, 
m. ; 107, m. 

Pmyth's Tour, 135, n. iS. 

Snakeroot, Seneca, used as general 
medicine in Europe, 73 ; only 
American remedy in Valentine's 
list, 94, n. 30. 

Social aspirants, ambitions of, re- 
pressed by fines, 143. 

Social conditions affected speech, 112. 

Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel, Letter to, in 1701, by Gov- 
ernor Dudley, 267, n. 22. 

Societies, religious, 166, 167. 

Society in the South, 284 ; 208. 

Sot-weed Factor, 105, m. ; 107, m. 

Soul, human, in insurrection against 
barbarism, 209. 

South Carolina, statutes of, 100, m. 

Southern people lacked the New Eng- 
land cohesion, 288. 

Southerner, the, became hospitable 
and generous, 288. 

Sparrow's Collection, 91, n. 21. 

Speech, common, ever-varying store- 
house of, 97 ; barbarous, of the 
common people, 134, n. 14. 

Spelling, bad, and clumsy writers, 

^ 233-235. 

Spencer, Dr. John, protests against 
considering comets ominous, 38, 
n. 8. 

Spencer's Of Natural Prodigies, 7, m. 

Spiders, use of, in cases of intermit- 
tent fevers, 71. 

"Spirit," the, and his victims, 295; 
302. 

Spirits, evil, popular belief in active 
meddling of, 19 ; particularly active 
on the Connecticut, 19 ; have given 
proofs of their presence with men, 24. 

Spiritual existence, palpable evidence 
of, afforded by witchcraft, 28. 

Sports, brutality of, 180; relish for 
inhumane, 181, 1S2 ; lawful to be 
used, 197, n. 12. 

Sprat's Royal Society, 42, n. 12 ; 44, 
n. 13 ; 86, n. 12 ; 90, n. 20. 

Sprengel, Kurt, on Wesue the young- 
er, 87, n. 14. 

Sprengel's, Kurt, Apologie des Hip- 
pocrates, 80, n. 3. 



Sprengel's Geschichte der Arznei- 
kunde, 28, m. ; 42, n. 12 ; 45, n. 15 ; 
47, n. 20 ; 53, m. ; 59, m. ; 88, n. lO ; 
citing Sanctorius, 51, m. 

Sprengell, C, on Sentences of Celsus, 
53. m. 

Sprengell's, Sir Conrad, Translation 
of Aphorisms of Hippocrates, 80, 
n. 3-_ 

Springfield infamous by reason of 
witches, 19. 

Sprites, groveling and grotesque, 22 ; 
not the ofispring of theological 
speculation, 23 ; denounced as 
Christian devils, 23. 

Stafford, Dr., of London, remedies 
prescribed by, 56, 57, 58. 

Stafford's A Brief Conceipt of Eng- 
lish Pollicy, 312, n. 17. 

Stars thought to control human af- 
fairs, 5. 

State Papers, 300, m. 

State, subordination of the, to the 
Church, 146 ; 195, n. 4 ; education 
for the service of the, secondary to 
ministerial, 225 ; 227. 

Statutes at Large, 89, n. 18 ; 260, n. 9. 

Stedman's, Edmund Clarence, Li- 
brary of American Literature, 140, 
n. 24. 

Steiner's Education in Maryland, Sol- 
lers in, 238, m. ; 260, n. 8. 

Sternhold and Hopkins's version of 
the Psalms, 213. 

Stiles's MS., 140, n. 25 ; 308, n. 5. 

Stith's Virginia, 156, m. 

Story's Journal, 200, n. 21 ; 202, n. 
23 ; 203, n. 26. 

Stoughton, Judge, witch fooler)' be- 
lieved by, 31. 

Stow's Survey of London, 256, n. i ; 

257. n. 3. 

Strachey, description of corn given by, 
104 ; account of Virginia, 132, n. 8. 

Strangers forbidden, 289. 

Stratford-on-Avon, disastrous confla- 
gration in, 157. 

Strongbow led colony of English who 
settled County Wexford in Ireland, 
no. 

Strype's Annals of the Reformation, 

258, n. 3 ; Memorials, 258, n. 3. 
Sukey Fry, ballad of, 1 37-1 38, n. 20. 
Sunday in pioneer Virginia, 155 ; of 

Elizabeth's reign, 155 ; in Virginia 
never a rigorous Sabbath, 159; 



340 



The Transit of Civilisatiojt. 



painfully rigorous repose on, a 
badge of Puritanism, i6o ; effort of 
Puritanism to transform into a He- 
brew Sabbath, 162 ; law concerning. 
Catholic in tone in Maryland, 164 ; 
sale of liquor on, in New Nether- 
lands, 165. 

Superstition, Protestant and Catholic 
zeal against, 20 ; part of fixed intel- 
lect of the age, 23. 

Surgeon sent to each colonial settle- 
ment, 73 ; word, as professional dis- 
tinction, disappeared from general 
use, 75 ; obliged to take appren- 
tices, 78 ; not esteemed in England 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, 93, n. 29 ; one, a Dutch 
bond servant, 94, n. 29. 

Surgeon's Mare, The, a book on medi- 
cine used by colonists, 94, n. 29. 

Surgeons, scarcity of, 75. 

Surrey, Virginia, MS. Records, 276, m. 

Swallows winter in clay of river bot- 
toms, 13, 14 ; Scandinavian and 
other myths about, 44, n. 13. 

Swearers, Endecott instructed to make 
good laws for punishing, 149. 

Swearing, cold water a punishment 
for, 148 ; forbidden by God's law, 
197, n. II. 

Swimming witches, a favorite amuse- 
ment, 19; 21 ; 46, n. 17. 

Swineherd, the, 281 ; antiquity of the, 
309, n. 8. _ 

Sydenham Society : Dr. Ent's letter 
in Willis's translation of Harvey's 
works, 41, n. 12 ; Adam's Commen- 
tary on P. /Egineta, 51, m. ; Are- 
tseus of Cappadocia on Acute Dis- 
eases, 51, m. ; Paulus /Egineta, 82, 
n. 7. 

Sydenham's Opera Omnia, 94, n. 30 ; 
Epistle I, in English, 94, n. 30. 

Sylloge Confessionum sub tempus Re- 
formandae Ecclesire, I Doctrinse, 
caput xvii, in, 202, n. 23. 

Symmes, Benjamin, founds a free 
school in Virginia, 221. 

Symond's Diary, 97, m. 

Table of the Astrological Houses of 
the Heaven, 5, m 

Tachenius, Otto, His Clavis, 11, m. ; 
83, n. 7. 

Talking in the street on Sunday for- 
bidden, 164. 



Tanner's Art of Physic, 65, m. ; Noti- 
tia Monastica, 255, n. i ; 257, n. 2. 

Taylor's, Jeremy, Life of the Holy 
Jesus, 200, n. 21. 

Teachers ignorant and careless, 243. 

Teaching, primary, done at home, 
211. 

Telephus, ancient legend of, 84, n. 7. 

Temple's North Brookfield, 237, m. 

Tenures, conveyance of, 275, 276 ; 307, 
n. 3 ; 308, n. 4. 

Themes of college graduates, 248. 

Theocracy, ideal of, evolved, 146 ; the 
best form of government, ig6, n. 5. 

Theriac, origin of and beliefs con- 
cerning, 63, 64 ; Iroquois had a sort 
of, 90, n. 19 ; Venice treacle a world- 
famed, 94, n. 30. 

Thevet's, Andre, New found World 
or Antarctike awakened curiosity 
about medicinal value of American 
plants, 92, n. 23. 

Thieves pardoned on condition of 
seven years' service in the colonies, 
300. 

Thomson, Benjamin, the renowned 
poet of New England, 125. 

Thomson on the Plague, 82, n. 6. 

Tiraboschi on the production of fossil 
trees, 11, m. 

Tiraboschi's Storia della Letteratura 
Italiana, letter of Aramatori in, 
questioning equivocal generation of 
insects, 41, n. 12 ; 68, m. ; cites from 
Odericus Vitalis, 95, n. 30. 

Toads, medicinal uses of, 57, 58 ; 85, 
n. 10. 

Tobacco, a thousand pounds of, paid 
as fee to Mrs. Livingston, 78 ; ex- 
traordinary medicinal virtues attrib- 
uted to, 92, n. 23 ; cultivation of, in 
Virginia, 286. 

Tolman's Education in Rhode Island, 
226, m. 

Topsell, note from, in E. E. T. S., 
No. 32, 15, m. 

Torture, legal, to produce confession, 
in use in New England, 183. 

Tote of English origin, 137, n. 19. 

Touch, miraculous, of English kings, 
dated from the Confessor, 91, n. 21 ; 
of seventh son almost as good as 
king's, 91, n. 21. 

Town community perpetual tenant of 
the manor, 277 ; phraseology of the, 
281 ; the prudentials of the, 2S2 ; 



Index. 



341 



309, n. 10 ; dead in New England, 
289 ; paid quitrents as a whole in 
New York, 309, n. 8 ; in Delaware 
Bay, 2S5 ; 310, n. 11. 

Town, corporate, responsibility of the, 
for the support of its school, 204, n. 
17; political importance of the, 
2S3 ; every vestige of the, destroyed 
in Virginia, 285 ; the taxpayer and 
the landowner, 287. 

Town government, primitive, 309, n. 
10. 

Town meeting the source of political 
power, 284. 

Town plan in Long Island, New Jer- 
sey, and Delaware Bay, 285 ; 310, 
n. II. 

Town system preferred by New-Eng- 
landers, 285. 

Towns, few, escaped fines for neglect 
of school laws, 234 ; the sources of 
power, 283 ; government fell into 
the hands of the, 284. 

Township in Massachusetts became 
the political unit, 283. 

Traveling on Sundays prevented, 164. 

Tree regarded as a part of the soil, 

275 ; 307. n- 3- 

Trials accompanied by great cruelties, 
32. 

Triton in Casco Bay, 15. 

Tryal of Witches, A, before Sir Mat- 
thew Hale, 23 m. ; Sir T. Browne's 
testimony at, 23, m. ; Hale's charge, 
24, m. 

Tuer's Historyof theHornbook,2i2, m. 

Tunes, familiar, corruption of, 187. 

Turell's Life of Coleman, i8g, m. 

Turf, hvig, and splinter, seizin by, 
275 ; 307, n. 3- 

Turk, the typical infidel, loi. 

Turkey, mottled eggs of, bred leprosy, 
70 ; various names of the, loi, 102 ; 
allied with bustard, 102. 

Tusser's Points of Good Husbandry, 5. 

Tutors, private, bought from among 
the redemptioners, 224. 

Tyler's, Moses Coit, History of Ameri- 
can Literature, 139, n. 24. 

Tymme's Silver Watch Bell, 174, m. 

Ultimogeniture, or " borough Eng- 
lish," 293. 

Unicorn observed on the Hudson, 15 ; 
horn of, an ideal antidote to poison, 
83. n. 7. 



Unitarian branded for blasphemy, 
149. 

Universal antidote, notion of, in medi- 
cine, 63 ; contained over sixty in- 
gredients, 63 ; known in England 
as Venice treacle, 63. 

Universities not recovered from scho- 
lastic grossness, 247. 

University scholars, mendacity of, 
260, n. g. 

Unlearned Chemist in Medical Libra- 
ries, 54. 

Upham, the industrious historian of 
Salem, 267, n. 22. 

Upham's Salem Witchcraft, only reli- 
able work on witches in Salem, 24, 
m. ; 47, n. 20. 

Uprightness of life mere sin, 172. 

Usufruct of land and cattle the com- 
monest bequest for benevolent pur- 
poses, 221. 

Valentine's day, choosing mates on, a 
taking God's name in vain, 154. 

Valentinus's, Basilius, Triumph Wa- 
gen Antimonii, 57, m. ; S3, n. 7 ; 84, 
n. 8 ; 85, n. 10; 94, n. 30. 

Vaughan's Directions for Health, 150, 
m. 

Venesection denounced, 82, n. 6 ; not 
so common in England as in France, 
82, n. 6. 

Venice treacle, universal antidote, 63 ; 
76 ; 94, n. 30. 

Venus, dittany used by, 66. 

Verbalism, ethereal, in Practice of 
Piety, 199, n. 19. 

Vermin compounded as medicine, 72. 

Vematti, Sir P., in Sprat's Royal 
Society, 90, n. 20. 

Vestry Book of All Faith's, MS. in 
Marj'land Historical Society, 139, 
n. 21. 

Village community. See Commune, 
THE Town. 

Village life of the North led to com- 
mercial development, 2S8. 

Village plan lost in the larger agricul- 
ture of the South, 2S5 ; crowded 
out in Virginia, 287. 

Village, the New England, same as 
the English farming community, 
283. 

Villanage prohibited in the funda- 
mental law of Massachusetts and 
Connecticut, 305. 



342 



TJie Transit of Civilization. 



Viper, the flesh of, used in antidotes, 
63, 64 ; the rattlesnake used as sub- 
stitute for, 64. 

Virgil's /Eneid, 66, m. 

Virginia, A Perfect Description of, 
100, m. ; 106, m. ; 133, n. 11. 

Virginia, alarm in, on account of min- 
isters, 249 ; college and free schools 
in, opposed by Berkeley, 249 ; col- 
lege subscription raised, 250 ; mer- 
cenary lawyers ejected from, 273 ; 
307, n. 2 ; the Southern model, 290. 

Virginia Brittania, 104, m. 

Virginia Calendar for 16S8, 137, n. 19 ; 
194, n. I. 

Virgmia Company endows a college 
at Henrico, 220 ; adds to endow- 
ment of Charles City School, 221. 

Virginia Company MS. Records, 220, 
m. 

Virginia, early, untouched by any 
strong religious sentiment, 160. 

Virginia Gazette, 137, n. 19. 

Virginia Historical Register, 224, m. ; 
262, n. 14 ; 263, n. 14. 

Virginia Historical Society, Randolph 
MSS. in, 149, m. 

Virginia life, multitude of documents 
relating to, 197, n. 13 ; extremely 
rural, 223. 

Virginia Papers, State Paper Office, 
I37,_n. 19. 

Virginia State Library, manuscript 
county records in, 54, m. 

Virginia, True Declaration of, 130, n. 6. 

Virginia Vestries, Early Manuscript 
Records of, 170, m. 

Virginians trained to politics and so- 
cial intercourse, 159 ; under curse 
for sacrilege, 1S3. 

Vitality, persistence of, 11. 

Voetius's Excertatio de Prognosticis 
Cometarum, 38, n. S ; lays stress on 
bad reputation of comets, 38, n. 8. 

Voltaire's Commentaire sur Beccaria, 
22, m. 

Vossius on bees, 39, n. 10. 

Voting, church, negative not taken in, 
190. 

Wampum, derivation of, 107. 

Ward, Nathaniel, bitter words of, 

against Irish rebels, 179. 
W'arts cured by rubbing with rind of 

pork, 60. 
Wasps produced by decaying fruit, 10. 



Watch-coat, a corruption of match- 
core (blanket), 106. 

Waterfowl produced from wood rot- 
ting in water, 12 ; habits of, better 
known to pioneer than pedantic 
philosopher, 12. 

Walking's Law of Tenures, 308, n. 3 ; 
On Copyholds, 308, n. 4. 

Watson's Annals, 73, m. ; 77, m. 

Weapon ointment derived from Rosi- 
crucians, 58 ; descriptions of its 
preparation. 59 ; much thought of, 
63. 

Weeden's Economic History of New 
England, 265, n. 20. 

Wendell's Life of Cotton Mather, 45, 
n. 15. 

Wesley-Whitefield revival, The, 167. 

Westminster Assembly on good works, 
199, n. 20. 

Westover Papers, by Byrd, 64, m. ; 
73 ; 73, m. ; 78. 

Wheat-raising in Massachusetts blight- 
ed by comet of 1665, 7. 

Whippings of English servants, 297, 
298. 

Whiston's Cathedral Trusts, 257, n. 2. 

White's, Andrew D., Warfare of Sci- 
ence and Theology, 43, n. 12. 

White-Kennett Library, London, 167. 

White, of Selbourne, on hibernation 
of swallows, 44, n. 13. 

Whitmore's Introduction to Code of 
1660, 195, n. I. 

Widows, ancient, church officers, 185. 

Widow's third of husband's estate, 293. 

Wife called " my woman," 136, n. 19 ; 
obedience the shining virtue of a, 
142. 

Wigglesworth, Dr. E., notice append- 
ed to funeral discourse of, 125, m. 

Wigglesworth, Michael, and the stable 
door, 163 ; the doggerel Dante of 
pioneer New England, 176. 

Wigglesworth's, Michael, Day of 
Doom, 124, 125 ; 163 ; 172 ; 177 ; 
damnation scene in, 173 ; 202, n. 
23 ; 202, n. 24 ; 203, n. 26. 

Wilderness, grand primeval, called 
"uncouth," 126. 

Wilkins, Alice, ailment of, cast by 
horoscope, 5 ; 36, n. 4. 

Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, an able 
mathematician, 35, n. i. 

Wilkin's works, 3, m. ; 14, m. ; 35, 
n. I. 



Index. 



343 



Willard, Parson, and Elizabeth Knap's 
hysteria, 27. 

WilUam and Mary gave freely for their 
college, 250. 

William and Mary Quarterly, vol. ii, 
54, m. ; 139, n. 23 ; for 1S97, 262, 
n. 13. 

Willsford's Scales of Commerce, 218, 
m. 

Wilson's Account of Carolina, 133, u. 
II. 

Wmsor's, Justin, pamphlet bibliogra- 
phy of American witchcraft, 47, n.20. 

Winthrop, John, the younger, pos- 
sessed works on astrology, 5 ; be- 
longed to chemical school, 54, 55 ; 
most noted master of medicine in 
colonial period, 56 ; books on sub- 
ject of sympathetic powder imported 
by, 59 ; dabbled in alchemy, 62 ; 
o'vned books on potable gold, 62 ; 
library of, S9, n. 18 ; 120. 

Winthrop, Wait, son of John the 
younger, 62 ; an adept in pana- 
ceas, 62 ; turned nearly all Nature 
to medicine, 93, n. 27. 

Winthrop's Journal, 150, 151, m. ; 
152, m. ; 1S6, m. ; 193, m. ; 196, 
n. 8 ; 206, n. 34. 

Winthrop's Letter to Sir N. Rich, 
191, m. 

Winthrop's Life and Letters, 206, n. 34. 

Witch, first, brought to trial in Boston, 
1648, 20 ; wife of Boston magistrate 
hai>ged as a, 20 ; weighed against 
church Bible, 21 ; with dog's body 
and woman's head, 27. 

Witch excitements in nearly every col- 
ony, 20 ; elements for, at Salem, 30. 

Witch literature of seventeenth cen- 
tury oppressively vast, 47, n. 20. 

Witch panics in England, 21. 

Witch trials. Continental, reported for 
Englishmen, 23. 

Witchcraft, renascence of, 20 ; attempt 
to suppress, by death penalty, 2 1 ; two 
hundred tried for, 21 ; accusations of, 
retracted, 27 ; evidences of spiritual 
existence afforded by, 28 ; mischief- 
working, at Salem, 31 ; partisans of, 
overthrown, 33 ; extreme faith of 
Luther in, 45, n. 16 ; Addison's 
Essay on, 46, n. 18 ; ferocious pur- 
suit of those accused of, 194. 

Witchcraft accusations on Long Is- 
land, 19. 



Words, peculiarities in use of, 135-137, 
notes. 

Witches, swimming, a favorite amuse- 
ment, 21 ; 100,000 arraigned and 
executed by Christian judges, 22 ; 
sprites known as familiars of, 23 ; 
diabolical dance of, 24 ; ride on 
sticks, poles, or brooms, 30, 31 ; 
persecution of, ceased after Salem 
trials, 34 ; how tortured in Eng- 
land, 46, n. 17. 

Woman, a, the most skillful physician 
at Salerno, 95, n. 30. 

Woman hanged for cleanliness, 32. 

Women physicians not uncommon, 
77 ; engrossed considerable share of 
medical art in New Jersey, 95, n. 
30. 

Women servants, degradation of, a 
source of evil, 299. 

Women, singing by, objected to, 186 ; 
went to meetings veiled, 190 ; Win- 
throp thought much learning dan- 
gerous to, 244 ; Mulcaster advised 
higher education for, 270. n. 29 ; 
teaching chiefly done by, 271, n. 29. 

Wonder-working Providences, 19, m. 

Wood for schools delivered in No- 
vember, 245. 

Wood, moon's influence on cutting, 5. 

Wood's Athene Oxonienses, 168, m. 

Wood's New England Prospect, 106, 
m. ; 107, m. 

Woodward's Rise of the Religious 
Societies, 166, ni. ; 167, m. 

World, the invisible, a reflection of 
the familiar material, 16 ; near the 
end of the, 41, n. 12 ; a cosmic 
pharmacy, 56. 

Worship, right of prescribing modes 
of, denied, 163 ; obligation of, 
greater than moral duty, 183. 

Writing, elegance of the old decora- 
tive, I2g. 

Writing schools, 218 ; maintained at 
public expense, 237. 

Wright's Domestic Manners and Sen- 
timents in the Middle Ages, 256, 
n. I ; 260, n. 9. 

Wright's Literature and Superstition 
of England, vol. ii, essay x, 23, m. 

Yankee twang in London, no; car- 
ried from England to Ireland be- 
fore Chaucer, no; transplanted to 
America, in. 



344 



The Transit of Civilizatioii. 



Yellow dock still used as a cure for 

jaundice, 85, n. g. 
Yellow fever, epidemic of, attributed 

to the first United States census, 

192. 
Yonge, Walter, Diary of, 91, n. 2i ; 

9b, m. 
Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 

149, m. ; 153, m. ; 161, m. 



Young's Subjects for Master's Degree 
at Hai-vard, 36, n. 3 ; 249, m. 

York County, Virginia, Manuscript 
Records, 74, m. ; 184, m. ; 223, m. ; 
275, m. 

Zeal, religious, without pity, 165, m. ; 
altruistic, evolution of, 166 ; for 
pity's sake, 167. 



Charles Alexander Nelson. 



THE END, 



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